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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) 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 “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious 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 although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {