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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D 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 gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after 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 rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {