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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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 the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains 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 god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding 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 called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {