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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

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

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared 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 sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, 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 Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {