D&D General Modrons should be terrifying

[Shades of Eternity]

Modrons are generally a joke and Primus their entity is usually the whipping boy to show how awesome Asmodeus is.

Maybe it's a response when the whole alignment thing was lawful vs chaotic, but honestly lawful neutral should be able to play the role of big bad as much as anything involved in the blood war.

So starting this thread to figure it out and to see where it leads.

I'll start

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Modrons should be the Borg as seen through the lense of Jim Henson.

The Modron March is an invasion of a group of beings in perfect harmony determined to mix your distinctiveness and data to their own.

When they arrive, they change the very land into another section of the land of order as it gets generated into a minecraft like design (or early cgi like the tv show Reboot) so that it can be integrated.

They can be talked to and reasoned with, but as far as they are concerned, it is only a matter of time before the whole universe is transformed into the ultimate form of order.

and the really scarry part is many people across the planes are okay with joining this army and losing their individuality because it provides an end to their neverending suffering as the ultimate loophole.

Stop evil by taking away that pesky individuality, take away petty arguements by universal consensus. afterall, it's inevitable (which I also believe is a monster in dungeons and dragons).

 

[Black Dougal]

Yeah, but some Modrons are such squares!

Actually, I like what you wrote and never really put that together. I hate when someone out imagines me lol.

 

[toucanbuzz]

No kidding. From another text:

Modrons have pitted themselves against—and beaten—all challengers at games of logic, so their supremacy in that area is undisputed. Modrons care only about order and law; they have no concept of good and evil. They can decide what is best and what is worst, but they cannot distinguish between right and wrong....Attempts to explain good and evil to a modron can only result in it equating good with order and evil with chaos, for those are the best and worst possibilities it can imagine. It should be no surprise that the goal of every modron is to organize Mechanus in the most orderly fashion possible. Given the opportunity, of course, modrons would spread their rigid pattern of organization over the entire multiverse.

And that's not even mentioning the Great March, which makes perfect sense to the Modrons and causes chaos across the rest of the multiverse as they flood planes with their information-gathering drones.

 

[J.Quondam]

Fear the day that modrons finally invent the ultimate superweapon: nano-modrons! When perfected and released into the multiverse, these nano-modrons will reduce the entirety of every Plane of Existence into fine "Grey Goo", ultimately to be reconstructed into flawless Lawfulness.

(But first, the modrons need to overcome their worst flaw: insipid, nightmarish cuteness. They are coldly, calculating machines destined to take over all the universes! That simply cannot be accomplished as long as they look like defective Precious Moments statuettes escaped from a polyhedral dice factory.)

 

[Shades of Eternity]

More ideas.

It's not that modrons aren't easy to kill.

Every time you fight a modron, the entire collective observes you and learns from it.

I could very easily use this to justify a resistance the next time you fight the modrons, as well as tactics, strategies that literally go for your weak points.

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Plus the Modrons should have engines that put those in descent to avernus to shame.

You put enough Modrons together and they are like lego. You can get something that looks like those killing machines from Labrynth.

The limit of their interchangable parts should only be limited by their collective imagination.

 

[jgsugden]

They follow any command given to them by a superior. Without question. That can be terrifying if someone figures out how to introduce their own orders. In my setting, there are three monodrones for each duodrone, three duodrones for each tridrone, three tridrones for each quadrone and three quadrones for each pentadrone. That means that controlling one pentadrone gives you command over 121 modrons. That is an army. They have tricks that make this hard, but I've certainly worked around that before.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

and here's the thing that Asmodeus really hates.

Primus is a loophole for devils to get out of hell.

 

[SkidAce]

and here's the thing that Asmodeus really hates.

Primus is a loophole for devils to get out of hell.

Clarify?

 

[Shades of Eternity]

A devil that wants their endless suffering to end can be transformed into a modron.

 

[Steampunkette]

Modrons should be terrifying... but not because they're Borg.

Modrons should be terrifying because they're an incredibly precise alien intelligence who desire perfect order in the entire universe and that order is something NO MORTAL MIND should be capable of comprehending.

Seriously. Modrons should be "Old Gods" of Law. Built at the beginning of time with the intention of shaping the universe into a perfect clockwork order based on whatever idea of order existed at that point in reality. No mortals, no humans, were alive to see those plans when the Modrons were formed, and there's no reason to expect that we, or any of our works, would be a part of it.