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D&D provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now 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 strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) 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 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot 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 died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” 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 fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {