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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive landscape of references, meaning that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of familiar ideas. Sometimes you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the celestial figures from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would appear in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to act as soldiers, commanders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gary Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, 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 get cheesy quickly. That general lack of interest means we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who created them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a massive war that concluded 70 years prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a blight that destroyed entire countries. A great deal about the history of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate entire regions if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the insanity infusing the location.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or fixations. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {