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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive 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 longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {