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D&D provides a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms 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 setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

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 get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {