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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He 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 evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, 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 expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {