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Dungeons & Dragons presents a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, D&D also bears a five-decade history of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this extensive landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for Dungeons & Dragons is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting crafted by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While devoted followers of Brennan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (Brennan strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since the mid-70s, but it took a while longer for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (February 1978) and 17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar made their debut, initiating a lineage of beings known as celestial entities that is still present in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, made by their creators to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and in general to inhabit their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Lower Planes and support the belief of their god on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly less fleshed out compared to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can do with beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Lords of Demons, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no official explanation, and every DM is free to come up with their own interpretation. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, one where the gods have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the beginning of the story. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestials became “wild”. They became monsters that could destroy entire regions if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They weren’t tricked, or led astray by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been wounded, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this might simply be a practical method to address Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a screaming, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {