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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include 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 the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy 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 happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel 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 madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {