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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains 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 direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue 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 start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {