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D&D presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian 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, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {