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D&D presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were essentially variations of the celestial figures from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their masters to serve as warriors, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains 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 Material Plane. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can evolve in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who created them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to make this question central to the world of Aramán, one where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became 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 the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “just” that conflict was, the humans who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {