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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background 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 heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection 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 setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {