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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, 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 D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate 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 belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created 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 make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {