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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you encounter elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world 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 really hates the deities!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon, where he presented new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar first appeared, starting a tradition of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons 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.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories 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 broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: 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 means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created 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 central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {