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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of DMs and players can craft countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than 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” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief 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 Lumalia and the fallen 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 demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of 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 gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the creatures that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {