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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe like when listening to “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (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 appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a lineage of beings called celestials that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples include 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.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, 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 one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the idea that, no matter how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {