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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a truly original take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially variations of the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably less fleshed out in contrast to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest 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 official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by humans in a massive war that concluded 70 years before the start of the campaign. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that after the gods died, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; one more terrible result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who won it may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. 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 mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {