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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series 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 creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, 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 occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos 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 {