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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where 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 role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like 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 although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range 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 unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {