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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging 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 online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable 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 looks 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 free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. 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 one-dimensional {