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D&D offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “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 its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (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 appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned 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 level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying 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 mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {