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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, 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, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly less fleshed out compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin 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 independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods died, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” 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. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped the DM focuses on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {