Are the Vaati the progenitors of the Modrons?

[Desdichado]

No Modron love?

Not from me!

I'm a confirmed modron hatah.

As for the slaad not really fitting the concept of chaos well--well, yeah, they don't. I tend to treat slaad as a bizarre offshoot of demon. Of course, I also tend to yank the Great Wheel cosmology for my homebrews, because I don't like it with it's emphasis on alignment, which is another concept that I minimize or excise entirely from my games. But even in a standard cosmology game, slaad work because you run them pretty much like you would demons who are just more chaotic rather than evil. Although they don't make as much metaphysical sense, they are at least easy to use.

And, they really aren't very froglike anymore. That's a holdover from earlier editions that I've more than happy to see fall away into oblivion. Here's the early concept sketches for slaad done before 3e came out by Sam Wood.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I think Modrons are the best idea there is for a race of lawful exemplars, they represent no one's laws but their own mysterious abstract laws. They may seem to whimsical as either geometric shapes (1e) or as legions of wind-up toys (2e and beyond) but remember some of the most dangerous things are those you underestimate.

Formians make horrible exemplars of laws, and they only came to Mechanus from Arcadia and from some prime world before that. There's nothing special about them, all they are is just ant-men.

As for Slaad they had other forms before, they were rather unstable in form, until the Slaad Lords like Ygorl, Ssendam and Renbuu decided they should be locked into their frog shapes, so they would have less competition. I think they should have more varied forms too, granted this whole being locked in frog forms does justify the Neraphim as much as I absolutely hate that creature. Because they were probably the first stable-formed inhabitants of Limbo that the Slaad-lords saw.

 

[Ripzerai]

Fighting the obyrith-led hordes of Chaos were not just the Wind Dukes, or vaati, but also a race of "angels" led by Asmodeus (according to FC2). The vaati were the rulers of much of the Inner Planes, having dominated the genie courts and the elementals, while the "angels" came from the Outer Planes of Law before they had blended with the planes of Evil or Good.

The aphanacts are described as angel-looking creatures of pure Law who preceded the rise of the inevitables in Mechanus. They were expansionist, believing in conquering the rest of the planes in the name of pure Law, and about 10,000 years ago they were wiped out, either by the gods or by a coalition of archons and baatezu working in alliance against the common threat. The inevitables arose shortly thereafter.

The recent Dragon article on modrons suggests that modrons may have existed since the beginning of time, in which case they'd be older than the aphanacts. It also suggests they might have been originally inevitables who found a new path of enforcing Law, in which case they'd be younger than the aphanacts.

It does make sense that Asmodeus and his legions were originally aphanacts before they, corrupted by evil, became the first of the baatezu. The Wind Dukes would have been their allies, but are probably not related.

The vaati eventually became almost extinct after the war against Chaos and the Battle of Pesh, because they didn't have an efficient way of reproducing (they can reproduce, but not quickly, which is why there are only a handful remaining in a single valley, the Vale of Aaqa, eons later). The baatezu, by that point, had learned to create more of their kind from the souls of lawful evil mortals, a conveniently renewable resource. It's an advantage of dominating an outer plane - souls come to you automatically.

Modrons combine the "implacable automaton devoted to order at any cost" vibe of the inevitables with the hive/insect vibe of the formians. If you like both inevitables and formians, you are honor-bound to love modrons even more, because they are what's best about the other two races. If you don't love modrons in such a situation, you suffer from cognitive dissonance and are advised to flee to Limbo while you still can.