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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and participants can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, 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, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes 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 unique worlds of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; 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 when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious 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 creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They became creatures that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the notion that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {