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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his 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 Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 in contrast to fiends. The 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 that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, 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. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel 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 madness permeating the place.

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 pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {