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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

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 were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The 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 engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome 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. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing 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 mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {