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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded 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 narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the gods were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate 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) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 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 fixations. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {