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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, 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, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, 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 made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. 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 security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {