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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal 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 Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {