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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on 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 fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate 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 help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd 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 canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, 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 became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening 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 kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying 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 mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {