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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

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

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “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 biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and 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 notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the god who made 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 chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening 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 kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 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 fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {