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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant 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 due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of creatures 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, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential 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 ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. 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 “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {