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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, 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 less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {