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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. 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 beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot 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 appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil 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 level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped 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 guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {