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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column 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 angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information 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 giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal 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 when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {