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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains 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 faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious 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 in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial 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 fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {