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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive creative space. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can paint any kind of picture. Yet, 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 “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you wince like when listening to “All Summer Long.”

Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (created by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may recognize some of his common themes (He really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original interpretation on a traditional D&D creature type: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Fiendish creatures (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their heavenly counterparts to show up. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in the publication Dragon editions #12 (Feb. 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian 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 magazine, where he introduced new monsters that would appear in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar angel, and the solar angel first appeared, initiating a lineage of creatures called celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to act as warriors, commanders, emissaries, intermediaries for humans, and overall to populate their domains in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Lower Planes and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. Despite their close connection with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with specific personalities. Famous examples include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms world, the mysterious Lady of the Lake from the Greyhawk setting, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from the game Baldur’s Gate 3.

The mythology of celestials is notably less fleshed out in contrast to demonic entities. The chaotic Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons tearing each other apart. The infernal Nine Hells are a version of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting side stories. And don’t get me started the Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestials can be gleaned in an short time of online research.

It’s not surprising that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a bigger range of appearances and roles, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can create for beings that are designed to be servants of a god. Certainly, they have independent thought, but their storytelling range is restricted. From that perspective, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and etc.) but they’re in the end unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Redefines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestials are simply not very compelling. Holy warriors of good that smite evil in all its forms can be cool, 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 occurs once the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and each Dungeon Master is free to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to make this question at the heart of the setting of Aramán, a place where the gods have all been slain by mortals in a massive war that concluded seven decades prior to the start of the story. So what happened to the servants of these divine beings?

Mulligan’s solution is straightforward, terrifying, and highly intriguing: They went crazy and turned into a blight that devastated entire countries. 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 when the gods died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became creatures that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how frightening such a being can be at the end of episode 2, as the character Wicander (Sam Riegel) encountered his “ancestor,” a fearsome celestial kept chained in a massive coffin.

It is no accident that the most interesting celestials in D&D, story-wise, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, slowly succumbing to the madness permeating the place.

The corruption seen in Campaign 4 of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own pride or obsessions. They are casualties; another terrible result of the War of the Shapers. As the new campaign progresses, I hope Mulligan focuses on the idea that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the outcome. Their realm has been wounded, their connection to the afterlife has been severed, and the beings that were once their protectors, guiding their spirits to safety after death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s original dilemma. It is simple to rationalize slaying an angel when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with rows of teeth, but I am also highly fascinated by this new declination of the celestial mythology in Dungeons & Dragons. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s aversion for divine beings in his campaigns, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {