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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious 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 markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. The DM 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 ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers 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 terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {