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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary 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 appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: 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 quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {