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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “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). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways 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. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {