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Dungeons & Dragons provides a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. However, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the best creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “a classic hit,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional 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 required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues #12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s when the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to serve as warriors, leaders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and support the faith of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is notably underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers game statistics for divine beings 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’s also only so much what you can do with 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 etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that strike down wickedness 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. For example, we still don’t know what occurs after the deity who created them perishes. 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 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 beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, terrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the history of this world, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” 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 fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that conflict was, the humans who won it 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 security after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Sure, this might simply be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane entity with multiple fangs, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {