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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines 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 very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM 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 great conflict that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: 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 current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {