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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant 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 due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past 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 celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {