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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include 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.

The mythology of celestials is markedly 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 version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances 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 divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse 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 fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {