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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass 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 Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) 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 Celestials

Honestly, 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 become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial 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 obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {