Agathions, angels, archons, azatas, argh!

The 5e Monster Manual only lists angels as its major celestial group, but past editions and Pathfinder added loads and loads of other varieties. As with many of the older groupings, monsters were often grouped into arbitrary or poorly distinguished categories. With the OGL, even more were added in third-party supplements.

For example:

• The Monster Encyclopaedia series introduces "anachra" or "anarchons" as the chaotic counterpart to archons.
• Green Ronin's Monsters of the Mind introduces psychic celestials.
• The Creature Collection series (including Strange Lands: Lost Tribes of the Scarred Lands) introduces angels, custodians, intercessors and more.
• Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary introduces angels, named "saboath" (probably a mispelling of "sabaoth," meaning "host [of heaven]"), based on Dante's Paradise.
• Pathfinder Bestiary series renames the "eladrin" and "guardinals" to the copyright friendly "azatas" and "agathions" while introducing even more variants like "manasaputras."
• Legends of Avadnu introduces "luminas" as weird alien celestials.
• Immortal's Handbook Epic Bestiary I introduces (epic level) angels based on biblical writings.
• Slayer's Guide to Elementals introduces "kherubic elementals" as aligned elementals (based on the four components of the cherub).
• Book of Hallowed Might introduces "unborn".
• The Monsters of Porphyra series reprints some of these and introduces new ones, I think.

Many of these categories were arbitrary or poorly distinguished. For example, archons and angels differed only in their alignment despite having no aesthetic difference. Indeed, archons did not have a consistent aesthetic at all, despite being lawful. Eladrin were celestial fey, guardinals were animal humanoids, angels were winged humanoids, but archons included all of the previous. Pathfinder got even worse with this, of course: they introduced a bazillion different new special snowflake demon races.

But Anger of Angels, in typical Malhavoc sense, dispenses with all the weird arbitrary categories in favor of just calling them all angels and demons, which I what I will do. In later posts I will introduce a replacement set of consistent aesthetics into which the existing monsters may be reorganized.