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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve 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 belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {