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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements 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 original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in 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 the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall 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 belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {