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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. 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 campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented imaginative thinkers find it difficult to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). Although devoted followers of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to show up. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon 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 wait until 1982 and the creator 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 where the deva, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures called celestial entities that is still present in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and in general to populate their realms 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 faith of their god on the mortal world. In spite of their direct relationship with the divine beings, 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 markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could murder in their games, and although celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with creatures that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also get cheesy very fast. That general lack of interest implies we still don’t know a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to devise their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is simple, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated whole nations. A great deal about the history of this world, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the gods were slain, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the Blood War resulted in her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped 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 world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to address Gygax’s initial quandary. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a screaming, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel highly fascinated by this fresh variation of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {