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D&D provides a unique creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, 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 sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates 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 Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 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 the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines 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 become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {