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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

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

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks 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. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. 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 massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {