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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique 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 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, 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 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {