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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original 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 few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms 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 faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {