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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: celestials.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons 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 Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing 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, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply 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 rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {