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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 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 D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much 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 defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel 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 little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, 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 aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {