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D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {