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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good 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 (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {