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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter 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 due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition 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 servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM 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 ended seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now 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 divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature 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 Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {