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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation 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 the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created 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 chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued 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 campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {