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D&D presents a distinctive creative space. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and players can paint countless scenarios. However, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, creatures, magic systems, established non-player characters, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to completely free themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a great deal of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter elements that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his recurring motifs (He strongly dislikes the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative take on a classic D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in Dungeons & Dragons

Demons and devils (often called fiends) have been part of Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time 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 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the angels from biblical religious lore; for more original versions, we had to wait until 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 first appeared, starting a lineage of beings known as celestials that is continues to exist in the latest edition of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestials are the servants of good-aligned deities, created by their creators to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their god on the Material Plane. Despite their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped in contrast to demonic entities. The Abyss has 99 layers of expanding chaos and demon lords warring amongst themselves. The Nine Hells are a version of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of wiki reading.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble biblical angels went underdeveloped. There are stories that Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for divine beings they could murder in their games, and even if celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is limited. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Demon Lords, 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 get it: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be impressive, but they also get cheesy quickly. That widespread disinterest implies we still don’t know that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who created them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is able to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question central to the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by humans in a great conflict that concluded seven decades prior to the beginning of the campaign. So what happened to the followers of these gods?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and very interesting: They became insane and became a blight that destroyed whole nations. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has yet to be disclosed, but it seems that when the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into creatures that could destroy large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, narratively, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with ending the Blood War led to her being corrupted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a little-known Planetar who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The corruption observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, nor led astray by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign continues, I hope Mulligan concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the consequences. Their realm has been harmed, their connection to the afterlife has been cut off, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to safety after death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve Gygax’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with the DM’s aversion for gods in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {