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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures 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 magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god 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 Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers 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 subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. 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 narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. 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 appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {