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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents 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 little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and 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 angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {