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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. At times you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic 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 D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the 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 Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with creatures that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without losing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that ended seven decades before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

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

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this may just be a practical method to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {