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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been included in D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics 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’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years prior to the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the war against the gods, 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 monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence 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 emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature 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 gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {