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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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 setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to 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 part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, 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 create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being 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 interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal 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 who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level 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, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {