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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show 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 its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting 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 benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest means 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 each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel 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 angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it 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 safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply 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 screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {