New Dragon Article: Ecology of the Fire Archon

[Lord Zack]

Well these are pretty cool, but I'm not calling them Archons. They'll probably be servants of Imix the Archomental or the Efreet or maybe both in my 4e Planescape campaign. All in all 4e's treatment of the Elemental Planes has me a bit intrigued, like the fact that they will supposedly be more accessible and useful for play though I will keep the structure of the Greet Wheel's elemental planes rather than the Elemental Chaos, though some ideas from that might be also integrated into Limbo.

 

[Gan Stiggür]

Hello.

It´s my firts post in this site...

and it´s a great article!!!

 

[Cthulhudrew]

While the visual is kind of interesting, I have always been curious about elemental/insubstantial sorts of creatures that wear armor. What's the point/function, other than just to look neat?

[EDIT- I realize they actually have armor calculated into the AC of the archons, but just from a non-gaming standpoint, would it really have any kinds of tangible benefits to such creatures?]

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Only Hound, Warden and Owl Archons had animal heads, and they were based on Angels called the Cherubim. Yes the Cherubim were originally more animalistic, and not "innocent baby angels" as they were later depicted. Guardinals I believe are vaguely based on Shamanistic Guardian Spirits, but there wasn't ever anything much to support that.

But to some extent I feel that 4e should have better explanations on what spirits are. Since spirits are a rather universal term.

 

[JohnSnow]

While the visual is kind of interesting, I have always been curious about elemental/insubstantial sorts of creatures that wear armor. What's the point/function, other than just to look neat?

If you read the article, you'll notice that the fire archons aren't insubstantial. They're more like Efreet or Djinn, in that they're associated with the element, not made of it. So they're more "burning" than disembodied fire. Think of them being more like "the Human Torch" than some walking mound of flames.

In that case, armor and weapons are wholly appropriate. Just as they were for the Efreeti on the cover of the 1e DMG (or 3e's DMG II).

 

[BadMojo]

Heh heh heh, "angelic furries".

Glad to see someone noticed, and good riddance.

We're currently playing a plane-hopping, Stargate-esque campaign with a hound archon PC.

There *are* a lot of Scooby Doo jokes. I'm not blaming the designers for that, but it is hard not to chuckle at the situations that come up when you have a giant bipedal dog guy in your adventuring party.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

If you read the article, you'll notice that the fire archons aren't insubstantial.

Huh- yeah, you're right- it's in the physiology part. I hadn't really gotten too far past all of the other mentions of "living flame".

Still, I wonder why creatures of flame would wear metal armor- since it seems that it would be a poor material for them to work with. Why not rock, or something of an alien (elemental fire) material?

 

[Shroomy]

Did everybody notice that this article is a late-posted entry from Dragon #361, rather than the first article from Dragon #362? The article is dated December 24th.

Chris Thomasson said they were having technical problems with the Dragon webpage and their IT guy was already out on the holiday. So instead of overloading a shaky system, they were going to reserve some of the content for after the 1st.

 

[GreatLemur]

Am I the only one who thinks these things look kind of . . . boring? I mean, they're miles better than the old bonfire-with-a-face fire elementals, but . . . I dunno. They seem a little bland. Maybe it's the cheesy-looking flame-shaped armor that's bugging me.

Still, definitely an improvement over the old elemental scheme, and I won't miss the furry archons, either.

Anyway, looks like some editors' notes slipped through the cracks and got posted in the sample stats:

Speed 30 ft. in breastplate (6 squares), base speed 40 ft. {{see skill points below; original text just said 30 ft. (6 squares)}}
Melee mwk scimitar +14/+9 (1d6+6 plus 1d6 fire/18-20) or
mwk scimitar +10/+5 (1d6+6 plus 1d6 fire/18-20) and
mwk scimitar +10 (1d6+3 plus 1d6 fire/18-20)
Base Atk +6; Grp +12
Special Actions death throes, fire burst

Abilities Str 23, Dex 24, Con 19, Int 13, Wis 16, Cha 16
SQ darkvision 60 ft., immunities, vulnerability to cold
Feats Iron Will, Two-Weapon Fighting, Weapon Focus (scimitar)
Skills Intimidate +14, Jump +14, Listen +8, Spot +9 {{numbers I come up with if speed is base 30 ft (20 ft. with armor): 14/8/8/9; if speed is base 40 ft (30 ft. with armor), then these numbers work; I'm making the assumption that the base speed is 40 feet above based on the stats here.}}
Possessions 2 masterwork scimitars, masterwork breastplate

I guess they're talking about speed below 30 ft. inflicting a -6 penalty to Jump.

 

[A'koss]

That's easy. Since we already have a pretty good idea of how all the numbers in the system scale (+1 per 2 levels), I imagine that 3 levels of one monster would be enough to reverse engineer the game. And they're not quite ready to have us do that just yet.

Well, we've already seen the stat card to the Spined Devil so I don't see the Flame Archon really telling us much more than we already know. A 4e character is what we'd need to see to really begin to sink our teeth into the new edition...