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D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. 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 Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” 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 first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) 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 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar 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 level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology 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 {