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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {