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Dungeons & Dragons offers a unique creative space. Theoretically, it serves as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. However, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and rich mythology. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D 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 “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the world created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his common themes (He strongly dislikes the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as evil outsiders) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A handful of distinct “divine messengers” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine editions 12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than variations of the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to hold out for 1982 and Gary Gygax’s “Monster Spotlight” article in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a tradition of beings called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the game.

In Dungeons & Dragons, celestials are the servants of benevolent gods, made by their masters to act as soldiers, leaders, messengers, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with individual traits. 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 Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to fiends. The chaotic Abyss has 99 layers of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. Meanwhile, all the essential information about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of online research.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for divine beings they could kill in their games, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning hindered their growth. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is limited. From that perspective, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens after the deity who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose 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 seven decades prior to the start of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is simple, horrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated whole nations. A lot about the past of this world, the divine conflict, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it seems that after the deities were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They became monsters that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity kept chained in a enormous casket.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose obsession with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was summoned by a cleric inside Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, slowly succumbing to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, nor misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful consequence of the War of the Shapers. As Campaign 4 continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “just” that war was, the mortals who won it may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this might simply be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s original dilemma. It’s easy to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a screaming, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythos in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the flat {