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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, 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 first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act 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 agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd 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 god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {