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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

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 few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated 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 seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature 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 divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {