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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). 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 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples 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 markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate 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 Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation 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 monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {