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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify 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 traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded 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 created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {