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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” 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 (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint 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 arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {