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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions 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 strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” 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 cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {