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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 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 the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {