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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. 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 campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called 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 good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle 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 gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and 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 in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series 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 celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings 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 games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting 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 Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {