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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of creatures called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms 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 belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {