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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He 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 Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit 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. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic 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 greater violence and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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 distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. 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 still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {