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Dungeons & Dragons offers a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it serves as a empty slate where the imagination of DMs and participants can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, monsters, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast universe of existing content, meaning that a lot of “fresh” content for Dungeons & Dragons is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get elements that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” on other occasions you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has gotten plenty creative in the past due to the unique worlds of its first setting (designed by Matt Mercer) and now Aramán (the setting created by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan for its fourth campaign). While longtime fans of Brennan and his Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (He really hates the gods!), the second episode stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

A Brief History of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been part of D&D since the mid-70s, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with individual titles appeared in Dragon magazine editions #12 (February 1978) and #17 (Aug. 1978). These were essentially riffs on the angels from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for more original versions, we had to wait until 1982 and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” article in Dragon magazine, where he presented new monsters that would be included in 1983’s Monster Manual II. That’s where the deva, the planetar, and the solar angel made their debut, starting a lineage of creatures known as celestial entities that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the servants of benevolent gods, created by their creators to act as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Heavenly Realms. They are paragons of virtue who battle the agents of disorder and wickedness from the Infernal Realms and help uphold the belief of their deity on the mortal world. In spite of their close connection with the divine beings, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances encompass the angel Lumalia and 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.

The mythology of celestials is notably underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. 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 the series Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more interesting subplots. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestials can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that beings who look like biblical angels received less attention. Rumor has it that Gygax felt uneasy about providing gamers game statistics for angels they could kill in their sessions, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of looks and roles, that problematic origin hindered their growth. There is also a limit to what you can create for creatures that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is restricted. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic creatures that can spin in a lot of directions without sacrificing their distinct identity.

The Way Campaign 4 of Critical Role Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that strike down wickedness in all its forms can be cool, but they also become clichéd quickly. That widespread disinterest means we remain unaware of that much about celestials. For example, we still don’t know what happens once the god who made them dies. There is no canonical answer, and every DM is free to come up with their own spin. The DM Brennan Lee Mulligan decided to center this issue central to the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been slain by humans in a massive war that concluded seven decades before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these gods?

Mulligan’s solution is simple, terrifying, and very interesting: They went crazy and became a plague that destroyed entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the divine conflict, and its aftermath in the present has yet to be disclosed, but it appears that when the gods were slain, the celestials went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate entire regions if left unchecked. Viewers caught a sight of how frightening one of these creatures can be at the end of episode 2, as Wicander (Sam Riegel) got to meet his “ancestor,” a terrifying celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, for example, was a powerful Solar whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War led to her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and transformed into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was summoned by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the huge labyrinth, gradually yielding to the insanity infusing the location.

The taint seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They weren’t tricked, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; one more dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, I hope the DM concentrates on the idea that, regardless of how “righteous” that war was, the mortals who emerged victorious may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their protectors, shepherding their souls to safety following death, are currently frightening disasters.

Certainly, this may just be a convenient way to solve the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad entity with rows of teeth, but I am also very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his stories, but I still prefer these monstrous celestials to the one-dimensional {