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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can paint any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to entirely detach themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 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 evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains 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 belief of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords tearing each other apart. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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 distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that after the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a enormous casket.

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 ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the evil in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “just” that war was, the humans who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, mad entity with multiple fangs, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the flat {