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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (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 “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the history 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 were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became creatures 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 (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {