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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, 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 II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world 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 happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas 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 fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {