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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy 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 Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {