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Dungeons & Dragons presents a distinctive imaginative arena. In theory, it acts as a empty slate where the creativity of DMs and players can craft any kind of picture. Yet, D&D also carries a 50-year legacy of worlds, creatures, spellcasting rules, established non-player characters, and rich mythology. Even the most talented creative minds find it difficult to completely free themselves from this extensive universe of existing content, so that a great deal of “fresh” material for D&D is a reiteration of sampled tracks. At times you get things that sound as good as “Gangsta’s Paradise,” other times you cringe as if hearing “a derivative tune.”

Critical Role has been highly inventive in the past thanks to the original settings of its first setting (created by the DM Matt Mercer) and now the new world Aramán (the world crafted by Brennan Lee Mulligan for Campaign 4). Although longtime fans of Mulligan and his other series Dimension 20 work may identify some of his recurring motifs (Brennan really hates the deities!), episode 2 impressed me because of a truly original take on a traditional Dungeons & Dragons monster category: angelic beings.

The Historical Background of Heavenly Beings in D&D

Demons and devils (often called evil outsiders) have been included in Dungeons & Dragons since 1976, but it required more time for their angelic equivalents to appear. A handful of distinct “angels” with specific names appeared in Dragon magazine issues 12 (Feb. 1978) and 17 (Aug. 1978). These were little more than riffs on the celestial figures from Hebrew and Christian sacred texts; for truly unique interpretations, we had to wait until the early 80s and the creator Gary Gygax’s “Featured Creatures” column in Dragon, 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 made their debut, starting a lineage of beings known as celestial entities 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, leaders, emissaries, liaisons with mortals, and in general to inhabit their realms in the Upper Planes. They are champions of good who battle the forces of chaos and evil from the Infernal Realms and support the faith of their deity on the Material Plane. In spite of their direct relationship with the gods, celestials are unique individuals with individual traits. Well-known instances include the angel Lumalia and the fallen Zariel from the Forgotten Realms setting, the Lady of the Lake from Greyhawk, and even the iconic Dame Aylin from Baldur’s Gate 3.

Celestial lore is markedly underdeveloped compared to demonic entities. The Abyss has ninety-nine levels of expanding chaos and lords of demons warring amongst themselves. The infernal Nine Hells are a interpretation of Game of Thrones with more bloodshed and more engaging subplots. And don’t get me started the mysterious Yugoloth. Meanwhile, everything you need to know about celestial beings can be gathered in an hour of wiki reading.

It’s understandable that creatures who look like angels from the Bible went underdeveloped. Rumor has it that Gygax was uncomfortable about giving players game statistics for angels they could murder in their sessions, and although celestials were subsequently developed with a bigger range of looks and purposes, that controversial beginning stunted their development. There’s also only so much what you can do with beings that are designed to be divine minions. Sure, they have independent thought, but their narrative potential is restricted. In that sense, the antagonists have far greater liberty: They have established masters (Demon Lords, Infernal Dukes, and etc.) but they’re in the end fickle and chaotic entities that can spin in a many ways without losing their distinct identity.

How Critical Role Campaign 4 Redefines Heavenly Beings

Honestly, I understand: Celestial beings are simply not very compelling. Divine champions of virtue that smite evil in every manifestation can be impressive, but they also become clichéd very fast. That general lack of interest implies we remain unaware of a great deal about celestials. As an illustration, we still don’t know what happens once the deity who made them dies. There is no official explanation, and each Dungeon Master is able to come up with their own spin. Brennan Lee Mulligan chose to center this issue at the heart of the world of Aramán, a place where the deities have all been killed by mortals in a great conflict that ended 70 years before the beginning of the story. So what became of the followers of these divine beings?

Brennan’s answer is straightforward, horrifying, and highly intriguing: They became insane and turned into a plague that devastated entire countries. A lot about the past of Aramán, the war against the gods, and its aftermath in the current era has still to be revealed, but it appears that when the deities died, the celestial beings became “wild”. They became monsters that could annihilate large areas if not contained. Viewers caught a sight of how scary one of these creatures 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’s not a coincidence that the most interesting celestials in Dungeons & Dragons, narratively, are those who have lost their divinity. The angel Zariel, as an instance, was a mighty Solar angel whose obsession with concluding the Blood War resulted in her being tainted by the devil Asmodeus and turned into an Archdevil of Hell. Fazrian is a little-known Planetar angel who was called forth by a priest inside the dungeon Undermountain and developed a fixation on “purging” the wickedness in the Terminus area of the massive dungeon, gradually yielding to the madness infusing the location.

The corruption seen in the fourth campaign of Critical Role assumes a distinct form. These celestial beings didn’t fall from grace. They were not deceived, or led astray by their own pride or fixations. They are casualties; another dreadful result of the Shapers’ War. As Campaign 4 continues, it is hoped the DM concentrates on the notion that, no matter how “righteous” that conflict was, the humans who won it may still regret the consequences. Their world has been harmed, their link to the hereafter has been cut off, and the beings that were formerly their guardians, guiding their spirits to safety following death, are now terrifying calamities.

Certainly, this might simply be a practical method to solve Gygax’s original dilemma. It is simple to justify killing an divine being when it’s a shrieking, mad creature with multiple fangs, but I also feel very intrigued by this new declination of the celestial mythology in D&D. I am not entirely in accord with Brennan’s loathing for gods in his campaigns, but I still prefer these horrific heavenly beings to the one-dimensional {