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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “a classic hit,” 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 Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the deities!), 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

Fiendish creatures (often called fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian religious lore; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a tradition of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been slain by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it 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 following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. 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 mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {