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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

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

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents 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 essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian 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 introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass 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.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings 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 far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

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