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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials 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 act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious 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 compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {