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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle 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 gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. 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 short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (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 celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel 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 Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {