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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 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 Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint 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 arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {