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D&D provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” other times you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional 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 the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals 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 the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. 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 Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, 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. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing 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 were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {