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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, 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 made their debut, starting a lineage of beings called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence 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 wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded seven decades before the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. 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 fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray 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 focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious 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 security following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {