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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, 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 Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel 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 “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {