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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {