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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms 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. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

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 sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. 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 {