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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil 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 takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation 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 flat {