An older thread, but an interesting premise. Modrons have never really hit for me, in part because they’re just too darned goofy-looking for my tastes. Taking a more horrific approach with them sounds more appealing, if done well.
While I dunno if I went full "horror" (horror really ain't my bag), I tried to make the modrons I included in an adventure in
Jewel of the Desert legitimately concerning. Their instantaneous "upgrade to leader when leader is killed" effect was kind of scary, and given they were included amongst other creepy/weird/disturbing extraplanar-invasion stuff, I suppose some implied horror was present there.
My notion for the present is that they are....maybe "employed" is the right word....as the universe's active defense mechanism against incursions external to reality. (Psionic power is the passive mechanism, but such forces are rare on this specific planet.) The macrophage equivalent, where psionic power acts like antibodies. As a result, they can be rather single-minded in their pursuit of cleansing or quarantine, which meant a fight against the PCs was inevitable.
If my players ever venture outside the world they live on (which could happen!), there's some more stuff to learn about the modrons. Being what they are, they don't really feel anything about the party having killed some of their number, since the party went on to successfully contain the "error" and, mostly accidentally, made all of the bad Far Realm stuff disappear along with the reality-fractures.
One idea I’ve played around with in my head relating to modrons to go a bit meta with them. Why are the extraplanar embodiments of order shaped like polyhedrons? Well, because the laws of D&D’s reality are governed by polyhedral dice, of course. In a world where God objectively does play dice, modrons make a lot of sense as His angelic host.
Y'know, I hadn't considered that angle, but I can see it. Too bad there aren't any icosahedral ones. Or perhaps that's what Primus is?
We have a tendency to think of dice as “random” and therefore “chaotic,” but they are ultimately governed by probability, which can be thoroughly analyzed and understood. There’s something appealing to me about the idea that modrons understand the fundamentally probabilistic nature of the reality they exist in, and treat the universe as a statistics problem to be solved.
Yeah, "chaos" is tricky, as is "random." In math, "chaos" is purely deterministic, but when used as a thematic-archetypal concept, "chaos" is more like...active un-patterning, where any time a pattern
might form it gets crushed immediately. Such a thing is unnatural and requires active effort to maintain.
That said, statistics brings in a very interesting side to this: namely, that statistical analysis
requires that you work only in large numbers. You can't see individuals in most contexts, because individuals are sample sizes of 1, which makes many statistical formulae break. I could see some of the "comedy" and jankiness of modrons arising from their need to actually work with individual people, but their bumbling ineptitude at actually predicting the behavior of a single person. To them, individuals are like single atoms in brownian motion, and they're trying to squeeze absolute determinism out of something that might not actually have it. This could, perhaps, explain the Modron March. They need mass data to collect and analyze.
