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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show 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 the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans 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 truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared 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 more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit 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 help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. 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 notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although 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 do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside 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 corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {