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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of Dungeon Masters and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the best imaginative thinkers struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of familiar ideas. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan really hates the gods!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Celestials in D&D

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names were featured in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than 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” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of beings called celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestial beings are the agents of benevolent gods, made by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an hour of online research.

It’s not surprising that beings who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and every DM is able to come up with their own interpretation. 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 concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the past of this world, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most compelling celestial beings in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the insanity permeating the location.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan focuses on the notion that, regardless of how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {