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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

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 the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons 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 mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness 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 takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {