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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. 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 campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” 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 angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, 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, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {