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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast 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 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 thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {