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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

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

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as warriors, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. Despite their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples encompass Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I get it: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of good that strike down wickedness in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities died, the celestials became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {