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Dungeons & Dragons provides a unique creative space. Theoretically, it acts as a blank canvas where the creativity of Dungeon Masters and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, Dungeons & Dragons also carries a five-decade history of campaign settings, monsters, spellcasting rules, well-known NPCs, and general lore. Even the most talented creative minds struggle to entirely detach themselves from this vast landscape of references, so that a lot of “new” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you encounter things that are as brilliant as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “All Summer Long.”

The show Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of Exandria (designed by the DM Matt Mercer) and now 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 deities!), episode 2 stood out to me because of a highly innovative interpretation on a traditional 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 D&D since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to show up. A few unique “divine messengers” with specific names were featured in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 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 hold out for the early 80s and Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon magazine, where he presented fresh creatures that would be included in the 1983 Monster Manual 2. That’s where the deva angel, the planetar, and the solar angel first appeared, starting a tradition of creatures known as celestials that is continues to exist in the most recent version of the role-playing game.

In D&D, celestial beings are the agents of good-aligned deities, made by their masters to serve as soldiers, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and overall to populate their domains in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who fight against the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the belief of their god on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are distinct persons with specific personalities. Well-known instances include Lumalia and Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, 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 Abyss has ninety-nine levels of ever-growing disorder and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of the series Game of Thrones with greater violence and more interesting side stories. And that’s not even mentioning the mysterious Yugoloth. In the meantime, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who resemble angels from the Bible received less attention. Rumor has it that Gary Gygax felt uneasy about giving players stat blocks for angels they could kill in their games, and even if celestials were later expanded with a broader spectrum of appearances and roles, that problematic origin stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are created to be divine minions. Certainly, they have free will, but their narrative potential is limited. From that perspective, the bad guys have far greater liberty: They have defined superiors (Lords of Demons, Archdevils, and so on) but they’re ultimately unpredictable and disorderly creatures that can evolve in a lot of directions without sacrificing their unique nature.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Reimagines Celestials

To be frank, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions 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 that much about celestials. For example, we have yet to learn what occurs after the god who made them perishes. There is no canonical answer, and every DM 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, one where the gods have all been slain by humans in a massive war that ended 70 years before the beginning of the campaign. So what became of the servants of these divine beings?

Brennan’s solution is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A great deal about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its consequences in the present has still to be revealed, but it appears that after the deities were slain, the celestial beings went “feral”. They transformed into monsters that could annihilate large areas if left unchecked. The audience got a glimpse of how scary one of these creatures can be at the conclusion of the second episode, as the character Wicander (player Sam Riegel) got to meet his “grandfather,” a fearsome celestial entity held bound in a massive coffin.

It’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestial beings in D&D, story-wise, are those who have fallen from grace. The angel Zariel, for example, was a mighty Solar angel whose fixation with concluding the eternal Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil. The planetar Fazrian is a obscure Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and became obsessed with “cleaning” the evil in the Terminus level of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the place.

The taint observed in the fourth campaign of Critical Role takes a different shape. These celestial beings did not lose their virtue. They were not deceived, or misled by their own arrogance or obsessions. They are victims; another dreadful consequence of the Shapers’ War. As the new campaign progresses, it is hoped the DM focuses on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the mortals who emerged victorious may nonetheless lament the outcome. Their realm has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been severed, and the creatures that were formerly their guardians, shepherding their souls to security following death, are now frightening disasters.

Sure, this may just be a convenient way to address the original creator’s initial quandary. It is simple to rationalize slaying an divine being when it’s a shrieking, insane creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythos in D&D. I don’t necessarily agree with the DM’s loathing for divine beings in his stories, but I nonetheless favor these horrific heavenly beings to the flat {