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D&D offers a distinctive creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a great deal of “new” content for D&D is a reiteration of familiar ideas. Sometimes you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although devoted followers of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), the second episode impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been included in D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A few unique “angels” with individual titles were featured in Dragon magazine issues #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than variations of the angels from biblical religious lore; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” column in Dragon, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a tradition of creatures called celestials 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, commanders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are champions of good who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms 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 Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to fiends. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s understandable that beings 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 sessions, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that controversial beginning 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 narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and so on) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Holy warriors of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be cool, but they also get cheesy very fast. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. As an illustration, we have yet to learn 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 central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that ended seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what became of the servants of these gods?

Mulligan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a plague that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities died, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a enormous casket.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in Dungeons & Dragons, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a cleric inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are victims; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 progresses, it is hoped Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that war was, the humans who won it may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their world has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It’s easy to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, 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 still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {