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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and participants can craft countless scenarios. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also bears a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, magic systems, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the best creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for D&D is a reworking of sampled tracks. Sometimes you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting 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 really hates the gods!), episode 2 impressed me because of a highly innovative take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Fiendish creatures (collectively known as fiends) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it took a while longer for their heavenly counterparts to appear. A few unique “divine messengers” with individual titles were featured in the publication Dragon issues 12 (February 1978) and #17 (August 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s when the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, initiating a lineage of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their masters to serve as soldiers, commanders, messengers, liaisons with mortals, and overall to inhabit their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the faith of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Famous examples encompass the angel 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 fiends. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, all the essential information about celestials can be gathered in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who look like angels from the Bible received less attention. There are stories that Gygax was uncomfortable about providing gamers stat blocks for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a broader spectrum of appearances and purposes, that problematic origin stunted their development. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be servants of a god. Sure, they have free will, but their storytelling range is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have much more freedom: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly entities that can spin in a lot of directions without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Heavenly Beings

To be frank, I get it: Celestials are just not that interesting. Divine champions of good that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs once the deity who created them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to devise their own interpretation. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose 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 seven decades before the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s answer is simple, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and became a blight that devastated entire countries. A lot about the history of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience caught a sight of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial held bound in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus level of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity permeating the place.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestials did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; one more terrible consequence of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign continues, I hope the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were once their guardians, guiding their spirits to security after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to justify killing 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 Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for divine beings in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {