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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. 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 mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons 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 Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks 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. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly 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: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the 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 summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {