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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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 the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (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 “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. 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 narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms 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. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, 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 world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas 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 (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling 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 Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {