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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing 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 domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared 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 version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {