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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, 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 “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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 the new world Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities 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 masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse 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 “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding 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 summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, 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 nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {