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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: celestials.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms 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 faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning 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 independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created 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 decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, 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 Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. 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 {