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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

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 handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {