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D&D offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers 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. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. 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 mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; another dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {