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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder 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 that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, 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 widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods 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?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {