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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (collectively known as evil outsiders) 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 “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out 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 the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {