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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials 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, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, 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 Infernal Realms 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 individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings 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 felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. 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 happens once the god who made 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 chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. 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 consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {