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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. 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 elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by 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!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called 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, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even 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 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded 70 years before the start of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {