Modrons

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Catharz
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Modrons

Post by Catharz »

The latest Dragon has a treatment of modrons, and while it's better than I'd expect from WotC, it's still got some problems.

So, is the Frank & K team doing a treatment of modrons in the Tome of Gears, or am I going to have to give these dice on legs a writeup myself?
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Re: Modrons

Post by Brobdingnagian »

I started playing in 3.5. What's a modron?
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Re: Modrons

Post by Catharz »

Brobdingnagian at [unixtime wrote:1176873030[/unixtime]]I started playing in 3.5. What's a modron?

Biomechanical robots shaped like dice (or other things...):

Image
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Re: Modrons

Post by Endovior »

Wikipedia has this to say...


Wikipedia wrote:In the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game, modrons are constructs native to Mechanus, the Lawful neutral aligned Outer Plane. Modrons are living creatures that resemble geometric shapes with humanoid limbs. They represent a living, physical manifestation of law without regard to good or evil, much as devils are a manifestation of law mixed with evil and archons are of law mixed with good.


Basically, they're beings of law that conveniently resemble the polyhedral dice you're using anyways, thus saving you money on miniatures. They've been pruned from recent editions, but have been statted out in the Web Enhancement to Manual of the Planes.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

I love the concept of the modrons, and their horribly cute visage (despite weighing about 4 times what I do)

I thought it was retardedly unfair to make pentadrones a la+5 PC race though (about the dragon piece) but I suppose the rogue/exiled modron (can't remember which) was pretty decent, I'd still prefer it to be a LA+0 without the constant need to make any non-human race that isn't an elf to be inherently worse than human.

one of my favourite characters from Planescape Torment was a monodrone, some awesome lines from him/her/it/they too.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

Brobdingnagian at [unixtime wrote:1176873030[/unixtime]]I started playing in 3.5. What's a modron?


textual informaciones

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dn ... ]otherwise google

monodrone
duodrone
tridrone
quadrone
pentadrone

and then there's some kind of higher-up status of 10 that goes up to 'primus' which is practically god status I guess, wit heach 'higher caste' being it's name's number squared so the 10-caste being 100 strong, the 9 cast being 81 strong, etc.

I think Dragon mag. had Primus in their primer for pact magic, he was a vestige you could bind with if I'm not mistaken.

err here's a link to it

http://www.technohol.com/infinity/thing ... p[br][br]I though the URL read 'technoLOL' which I thought was just awesome

so yeah, modrons ftw
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Re: Modrons

Post by Brobdingnagian »

It gets to a point where those things are horridly under CR'd...

I wasn't paying attention to stats until I hit the Hexton. A CR 13 monster... that casts spells as an 18th level cleric. Woot, let's open a couple Gates and Jovoc-bomb for the win.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Fwib »

Is this new Dragon write-up very similar to the old 3.0 web enhancement? (which was in its turn, very much just an update of the 2nd ed. modrons, I have no idea what 1st ed. modrons were like)
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Re: Modrons

Post by Cielingcat »

Couldn't we have a lawful neutral outsider race that's more... interesting? Less gimmicky? Perhaps something more conductive to creating interesting adventures? A sort of Borg like race obsessed with spreading law and perfection through the multiverse would seem much more conductive to the kind of adventure people play D&D for than a bunch of giant sentient dice.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Immortius »

In my opinion that's the real issue with law and chaos in D&D - they much more passive forces that good and evil. They're associated with behaviours like cleaning your room or having 5 days worth of dishes stacked unwashed next to your sink.

It might be interesting to promote Law and Chaos up to major forces on par with good and evil. Someone who is lawful would go around imposing order and uniformity on others, like the borg, with no tolerance for any difference. Someone who is chaotic would work to destroy all semblance of order.

Of course, the upshot would be that most you could only be one of Lawful/Chaotic/Good/Evil at most, and that most existing races would be neutral with respect to Law/Chaos.

I did like Nordom though in Planescape: Torment.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Judging__Eagle »

Formians are sorta Borgy.

They enslave people that they capture and make them work as part of their hives.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Catharz »

Here's the dark of it: Modrons aren't really beings of Law. Sure that's what they want you to believe. They kinda look like inevitables, they have an orderly society, and they live in the Clockwork Nirvana. Take a closer look. A "tridrone" has four sides. A "quadrone" has six. A Pentadrone doesn't even look like a normal modron. And a duodrone? Your guess is probably almost as good as mine.

Not only that, but next time you see a couple of modrons, take a close look. Every modron is made a bit different. In fact, some tridrones are right-side-up pyramids, and some are upside-down! Little markings are different too. Sometimes it's the metals used, sometimes it's the pattern of rivets, and sometimes it's the living flesh.

Which brings me to my next point: Modrons aren't true constructs. They're part construct, part humanoid. I knew a wizard who once found a few dead modrons (don't get any ideas, this was at the time of the March) and cut them open. He made a few permanent ilusions of what he say, and showed them to me. On the inside, a modron has some of what you might expect: gears, boilers, wires, and all other mechanical things you'd associate with that sort of construct. What blew us away is that they've also got human bits. It's almost like each of the drones was a human with construct grafts, or a construct with human grafts. The wizard said something about the number of organs relating to the type of the 'drone. Whatever the dark of that is, it probably ain't pretty.

So, what are they? Well, some sages has said that they're the secret agents of Chaos, trying to throw a wrech in the Plane of Gears with their ill-logic. That wizard friend of mine thought that they were once a humanoid race who sought true perfection of Law, and didn't get it quite right. What's the Real Truth? Who knows, cutter. The modrons sure aren't talking, and out here, Truth is never constant.
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Re: Modrons

Post by tzor »

I've always loved the idea behind modrons. Then again I've always loved the victorian are two dimensional equivalent called " Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions."

One could argue what exactly a creature of "law" ought to be. A creature of law must be perfectly heirarchical. (Beause law is effect a cute term for discipline and order.) It must form its function within a larger framework towards a common if unknown goal. Modrons fit this notion to a tee.

I've always envisioned modrons as something akin to a hybrid equivalent of the Dr. Who humanoid reality calculators of Logopolis. It it their mere existance and attention to the maste program that keeps the multiverse in existance. The perfect example of law doesn't do anything it simply is. And thus they manage to maintain to be.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

I think the problem with law/chaos was already addressed by frank and K, in that chaos is usually too disruptive and incompetent where-as law is the opposite, though usually with extreme to the point of uselessness.

I think good/evil should trump law/chaos in terms of what's more important to fight about.

Generally, most people dont' care if you pay your parking tickets or not - they're more interested in your help in fending off those fiendish fiends of fiendery.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Cielingcat »

Hence why Law and Chaos should be interesting. No one cares about matress tags and you'll never write a good story about them-but if an alien force is invading your home so that they can "perfect" you, you can have a lot of fun with that. Similarly, if you have this mass of people who want to go around destroying stuff or whatever, you can write an interesting adventure about that.

Basically, I want all four alignments to be really really bad, with Neutral being the one that adventurers play. Only neutral is "earth" while Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are the evil aliens.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

in that case wouldn't then they all be evil since they're destructive?

evil is primarily embodied by negative energy, or destruction right?

the way I see it, chaos stops short of torching government buildings and maiming constables because those are not chaotic acts, those are chaotic EVIL acts (or maybe just evil in general).

Idealistically humans are more neutral than anything but we slide towards law more than chaos - it makes things much easier.

I'd prefer to keep all four alignments represented heavily on 'earth' - we are more or less the neutral balance of it all right? so we should have a fair share of it all.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Cielingcat »

I prefer to distance alignment from actual people, since its completely impossible to write a description of an alignment that everyone will agree with. I couldn't, for instance, call equality and sharing good even though I personally believe them to be, because there are people who disagree with that on idealogical or philosophical grounds for reasons they believe to be valid, and a game system probably shouldn't advocate its writer's morals.

In the proposed system, Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all really bad, otherworldly things that no one in their right minds would follow. Neutral isn't balance, but an absence of any of these four. In fact, that's what neutrality has to be, since alignments are described as mutually exclusive.
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Re: Modrons

Post by User3 »

{{Insert witty joke about alignment and nature's harmonious four-day timecube.}}

Seriously, I agree with cielingcat here. I mean, I can think of real world philosophies that you could put in any alignment box and be right. At which point alignment ceases to be meaningful as a _moral_ compass.

For instance:
So angels should be pacifist hippies that *will* knock you unconscious and brainwash you while you sleep. Its not pretty. But that pacifism thing doesn't sound so bad, right? Well, you remember BoED, where chastity is an Exalted virtue? The good guys actually want everyone to be chaste, because that prevents the draining of soul-energy from the pure realms, and thus into reality where evil can get at it (by eating babies, of course). (Actually, you could really make this work with a gnostic metaphysics... i am such a geek).

Evil *is* about baby-eating, because baby-eating gives them more soul-power. But its not evil - they are so far removed from humans that good and evil in the colloquial sense are inapplicable to them - its really an argument over soul-energy resources with Good, and has nothing to do with morality at all. You're just objects to them - not moral beings.

Law is about reducing entropy everywhere in the universe. And you're interfering merely by existing!

Chaos is about bringing about the heatdeath of the universe as fast as possible. Sure, it will kill them too, but that's ok, that'll allow the next universe to get started.
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Re: Modrons

Post by tzor »

I have to and search for Frank’s arguments. Personally I think law and chaos makes for an interesting balance although in the end the universe is stacked so that chaos wins. (Chaos wins because entropy is a natural result of all things and entropy is chaos.)

The law/chaos battle is the ideal conflict between the ideal design and the overwhelming force. The massive force of chaos resisted by the well designed actions of a lesser but more disciplined force. This is the general idea of the principles behind the blood war.

I have a different aspect on the good/evil conflict and few would probably agree with me. True evil is completely self-centered; true good is completely self voiding. Here evil is on the loosing side because you can’t win the game. Sure you can reign for a few million years but eventually the universe will defeat you. (You, on the other hand can’t defeat the universe since your existence is based on the universe and it’s not in your self interest to cease to exist.) Good on the other hand can’t “win” either (can you really save everybody) but good wins when it realizes that “winning” isn’t the good solution but being good day in and day out is all that matters.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

Cielingcat at [unixtime wrote:1176925089[/unixtime]]I prefer to distance alignment from actual people, since its completely impossible to write a description of an alignment that everyone will agree with. I couldn't, for instance, call equality and sharing good even though I personally believe them to be, because there are people who disagree with that on idealogical or philosophical grounds for reasons they believe to be valid, and a game system probably shouldn't advocate its writer's morals.


I understnad and voice no protest.

In the proposed system, Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all really bad, otherworldly things that no one in their right minds would follow. Neutral isn't balance, but an absence of any of these four. In fact, that's what neutrality has to be, since alignments are described as mutually exclusive.


I'd say neutral can also be a balance of the aformentioned four, but understnad what you mean.
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Re: Modrons

Post by Username17 »

Here's an excerpt from the Book of Gears, under the Denizens of the Planes of Law section:

Modrons: Singularity of Purpose

For those of you who don't remember: Modrons are the original creatures of Law from the old days of AD&D. They haven't been seen very often because they were originally written as a joke. Their very existence is as offensive to many players as the fact that they were essentially retconned out of existence is to others. And what's that all about? It's because the Modrons were originally written up as giant dice. Yes, really. The different types of basic Modron are shaped like four sided dice, six sided dice, 8 sided dice, the whole thing.

So if your DM jumps on the "let's forget this ever happened" bandwagon, we understand. The original write up of the Modrons was actually pretty insulting. But since then there have been a number of variously successful attempts to rehabilitate them and make them independently awesome. Different Modron art has been made by Tony DiTerlizzi and Eric Campanella that looks pretty darned awesome – and not like your DM put a 6 sided die on the battle mat at all. Instead each Modron looks like a ghastly hybrid of metal and flesh covered with cogs and wheels where spindly appendages emerge from a solid (though not rollable) core.

So assuming that you use some of the reform Modrons from late in 2nd Edition, the Modrons are actually pretty cool. They represent the idea of Law as an implacable and incomprehensible force. They are at their best when portrayed as being so single mindedly focused on some long term goal that they actually don't even care about you. Sometimes they destroy your village, sometimes they don't, and there's really no predicting that sort of thing unless you're knowledgeable about the Big Plan. Now I know what you're thinking… that having a plan so convoluted and far ranging that mortal minds cannot grasp it or predict its unfolding is actually indistinguishable from not having a plan at all and just performing actions at random. And yeah… that's true. That's DnD alignment for you.

The Modrons come from a city in the Clockwork Nirvana called Regulus and have a rigid caste system where more powerful Modrons are told more of "the plan" than less powerful Modrons are told less. Each Modron is told exactly as much as it needs to know to complete its assigned tasks. And in the face of a long term plan of this magnitude, that pretty much means that every Modron is kept entirely in the dark about just what the heck it is doing or why it is doing it. The Modrons are arranged into a rigid caste system with no possibility (or concept) of personal advancement. That would be pretty stultifying if they were like humans where they all started out equal, but they aren't like that at all and Modrons of each caste sincerely don't have any desire to move up to another caste. At the very bottom (or at least, "most numerous and least clued in to the plan") there are the cogs. Cogs look like little gears and have the ability to transform into any object of roughly a cubic foot or less. When properly supervised by a higher level drone, they can take the shape of quite complicated pieces of clockwork and frequently do so. Above them are various drones of various shapes and sizes, each constructed of materials mechanical and biological to fulfill its role in the great plan.

At the top there is Primus, who has been variously described as everything from an Intelligent Item to a reasonably powerful Outsider to a guy working the machinery behind a curtain. Seriously, your campaign can potentially reveal anything you want it to about what is really in the center of Regulus because that's been retconned so many times that noone knows what the official answer even is right now. Primus has been killed off several times in official continuity as part of various authors attempting to delete the Modron race from D&D. However, someone always brings Primus back, because D&D never really throws anything away (except the pygmies, that was too racist even for the 1980s). If you demand continuity in your life, then it seems that Primus simply can be killed time and time again, each time getting replaced with a new Primus who is in turn enlightened as to the nature of the big plan and granted the authority to turn the wheels of Regulus.

The Modrons mostly sit around and operate the machinery in Regulus that apparently keeps all the giant gears and pistons running in the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. So even if they exist in your game's continuity, chances are good that you'll never encounter them. Every so often, a whole lot of Modrons open up gates to other planes and start wandering around in big groups doing… stuff. The amount of time that Modrons spend between their "March" is supposed to be constant but actually every single Modron March that has ever been mentioned in any published adventure or story has taken place out of sequence so one is forced to conclude that actually the Modron March happens whenever the big plan calls for it and rumors of a great schedule are just rumors. The Modron March is generally not harmful and the Modrons don't seem to go out of their way to chase anyone who gets out of the way, so it doesn't seem to be an invasion. Although who knows? The plan of the Modron is so incredibly far reaching that it is entirely possible that they simply walk around in huge armed groups wandering seemingly aimlessly through the planes at irregular intervals doing no harm to anyone so that at some later date they can do the same thing and then just destroy some enemy that is predicted in the distant future.

Unfortunately, now I'm going to have to talk about the Hierarchs. These are a layer of bad asses that live in the eco niche between drone and god. They are roughly equivalent to the high end fiends and celestials – coming in various flavors and power levels like Mariliths and Balors do for the demons. Unfortunately, noone has ever overhauled the art on these guys to the point where they don't look like ass. Sorry, the Hierarchs of Regulus look like they were drawn by Napoleon Dynamite and there's nothing nice I can say about them. If I were personally inclined to run with these guys at all I would be forced at gun point by the players to have them look like… something else. Putting them back into the theme of the Modron Drones is probably best, because at least then they appear to be Modrons in the same way that a Trumpet Archon is readily identifiable as an Archon. Which means that honestly the Hierarchs are much cooler if they look like Daleks. And the truth of that statement is probably the single greatest argument for walking away from the whole thing, as advised by Monte Cook.

So what do Modrons do in a story? Mostly they show up with a specific set of instructions that they attempt to fulfill. They speak their own language but the more powerful ones also speak additional planar languages (hope you speak Formian). If the player characters attempt to prevent the Modrons from doing their thing, the Modrons will fight. Otherwise they'll simply complete their task and leave. If other creatures attempt to stop the Modrons, they'll fight them. Modrons hold no grudges and have no loyalty but to the plan. They will seamlessly switch sides in a battle if a different group proves more detrimental to their mission. The Modrons don't know why they are doing what they are doing, only Primus does (assuming Primus exists, in some versions The Plan is actually a flaw in Mechanus and there is no reason for any of it). And yet they will fight to the death to complete their mission. With good art and weird dialogue, the Modrons can serve as dynamic antagonists or useful allies.

Like an amazingly intricate puzzle box, the Modron Race unfolds, collapses, and progresses in countless ways, but at the end, it's still a puzzle box. The entire point of the Modrons is that you never get clued in to what they are doing or why they are doing it. But if you don't want to use them at all, I understand.

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I hope that's what you were looking for.

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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

Frank... that did absolutely nothing...

...and yet I loved it. I say, stfu4me.
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Re: Modrons

Post by User3 »

More Frank & K goodness! You may want to change " ... more powerful Modrons are told more of "the plan" than less powerful Modrons are told less.". Also, will there be any focus on Lawful outsiders in general, or just those coglikes?
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Re: Modrons

Post by Username17 »

Digestor at [unixtime wrote:1176929617[/unixtime]]Frank... that did absolutely nothing...


Pretty much, yeah. The statement on Modrons is there to bring people up to speed on what they are, because a lot of readers don't know. It's more of a history lesson than an overhaul of the monsters. I mean, the game mechanics for Modrons presented in the various web enhancements and shit aren't helping us here.

Do people want a Modron Drone class for make Drones of CR 1-20? That's entirely doable.

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Re: Modrons

Post by Digestor »

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1176934640[/unixtime]]
Digestor at [unixtime wrote:1176929617[/unixtime]]Frank... that did absolutely nothing...


Pretty much, yeah. The statement on Modrons is there to bring people up to speed on what they are, because a lot of readers don't know. It's more of a history lesson than an overhaul of the monsters. I mean, the game mechanics for Modrons presented in the various web enhancements and shit aren't helping us here.

Do people want a Modron Drone class for make Drones of CR 1-20? That's entirely doable.

-Username17


No clue about that, but I mostly meant "that did aboslutely nothing" much in the same sense that the modrons basically do nothing, although they're always doing something - god err Primus knows whatever it is...

so the piece was very fitting

I'd love to play a rogue/exiled modron PC but doing that isn't too hard, also, I won't actually be playing anytime soon (or ever) so it doesn't matter (plus I could whip one up on my own if need be).

Still, loved the piece on it. The dragon article on them gives a pretty specific idea of what's going on - that is, nothing.

Ughhh basically Orcus took over, killed primus - one of the secundus became evil, battled the other secundi, the evil one did evil - was outlawed, the normal one became primus - modron race was crippled, but the gears kept spinning and a whole lot of nothing was accomplished.

was it orcus or tenebrous? or the same? whatever.

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