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D&D presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good 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 close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {