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D&D offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: 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 required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. 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 still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords tearing each other apart. The 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. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. 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 one-dimensional {