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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions 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 good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary 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 enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel 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 loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {