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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” 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 original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles 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 hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, 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 Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history 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 became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, 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.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel 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 Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {