Ok here’s an odd one that I wasn’t sure should be covered in this column but decided would nevertheless be of interest to Planescape fans. Published in the January 2011 issue of Dungeon (#186), here’s the co-author Greg Bilsland’s preamble for some context as to what this article entails:

At Gen Con this year, I led a monster design seminar that included Bruce Cordell and Mike Mearls. At the seminar, we promised that one of several old school monsters that had not yet appeared in 4th Edition would be featured in an upcoming article. We let the seminar participants decide which monster that would be, and we spent much of the rest of the seminar discussing story and mechanical ideas for that creature.

There was even a podcast released with a recording of the seminar, which I would’ve loved to have listened to but is now seemingly lost for good unless someone out there has maintained copies of the original D&D podcast without sharing it around. It’s one of the game’s weirder bits of lost ephemera considering that it was at one point free and widely disseminated, but alas, so far as I’ve been able to tell no one thought to save a copy and so when Wizards of the Coast removed the original archive it died along with the rest of the non-Let’s Play recordings. For context, this failed thread is the most thorough search for these materials I’m aware of, and it went absolutely nowhere (needless to say, as did my own efforts). A tiny bit of additional context is offered in Bart Caroll’s article “Modons’ March” for Dragon #395 (January 2011), but this is more of an overall article about the history of the creatures than any new lore. It’s still worth a read if you’re way into modrons like I am, though I don’t think that it includes any new information, and it does repeat the oft-wrong information that the Great Modron March appears every 17 years rather than every 289 years (17 cycles of 17 years), as was actually established. I do appreciate the idea of modrons “based on negative or imaginary numbers,” though—why hasn’t anyone done something fun with this concept yet?

Anyhow, “Creature Incartions Modrons” is just four pages long, two of which consist entirely of Fourth Edition stablocks. Perhaps because they were trying to needlessly retcon everything in the multiverse during this era, the modrons as presented here are unsurprisingly inconsistent with ones from the past/future of the game. In this new conception, there are only three types of base modrons while all of their superiors are the identically-stated hierarchs. This vast simplification is going to annoy most anyone who was glad to see them reappear in the edition, but more interesting are some of the overall lore changes: modrons are now formed from the “permanent disassembly of higher ranking modrons.” 

For that matter, while the lore in this article resembles what we knew about modrons before, much of what’s here is new and inconsistent. For instance, they now hate portals, for reasons that sort of make sense but really just feel like a justification to put them into conflict with PCs more frequently and thus cause more fights. Fourth edition just fucking loves its fights.

…modrons are especially concerned with the proliferation of portals across the planes. They see portals as rents and weak points in the fabric of the cosmos, riddling existence like a rotten apple being consumed from within by burrowing worms. Thus, modrons have begun to appear at portal mouths to contest the passage of other creatures. Some modrons allow access if they judge the need important enough, but others adamantly refuse entry. Some contingents have started collapsing passages within and between worlds wherever they find these passages, no matter the purpose of the portal. The one question no one has yet answered with certainty: What if the modrons are right?

What else is changed? Well these Fourth Edition modrons are far more video game-y in their construction, and split in twain like game enemies when murdered, or conversely they combine together to become more powerful. “Each modron can assemble with others into a more powerful modron, and they can disassemble into separate units as the tactics of the battlefield require. A hierarch modron might take an overwhelming blow only to break apart into a scattering of less powerful but tactically important individual base modrons.” I get the mathematical impulse here, but modrons have enough of identity that you can literally play as them in other editions, so making them so interchangeable doesn’t seem right to me. It’s also not like there are a ton of wild configurations for them to join into, either, given that there are only four statblocks.

The final big change concerns Primus and his modron march. Primus is now more a sum of the species than an individual, godlike being. 

All the modrons that currently exist are individual components of Primus. Its disassembly and renewal each cycle gives rise to thousands of new individual modrons, replenishing those that have perished in the preceding cycle, and perhaps increasing the total number of modrons in the universe. The length of time between marches is determined by the alignment of many different cycles, all of which are tracked on a clock only Primus can read.

 As far as I’m concerned, this is a nonsensical theory regarding the modrons by outsiders like so many others before it, though of course it’s couched in Fourth Edition’s authoritative prose rather than Planescape’s more slippery and literary language. That this schedule is unknown seems dumb as it goes against modrons’ lawfulness, but even worse is the idea that Primus might be a primordial:

…perhaps it was a primordial, but unlike most primordials, this vast elemental machine possessed lights that blinked as it clicked, whirred, and belched forth smoke.

So yes, there are statistics and even some wildly contradictory lore for modrons in Fourth Edition, but as is so common in this edition they use the same name for creatures radically  different from the ones we knew and loved from before. There’s a ton of changes seemingly just for the sake of changing things, and I’m just glad that the modrons in Fifth Edition didn’t seem to take any cues at all from this tiny appearance a decade earlier. I can’t help but hope we don’t hear about modrons again until Planescape returns “properly,” but Fourth Edition does tend to find new ways to disappoint me, so I can’t help but assume we’ll be seeing them again soon.

Ugh. Primus now hails from a “realm” (shouldn’t that be Astral Domain?) known as mechanus, which means that it’s in the Astral Sea despite being likely a primordial? Or is it elsewhere and they’re just confused? God, I don’t know why I care enough to ask.