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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes 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 encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if 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 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 defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, 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 monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, 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 Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {