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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, 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. 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 (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {