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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created 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 common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started 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 beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {