The Great Modron March... any ideas?

[UltimaGabe]

Hey, everyone. I'm not positive this is the forum to post this in, but I had a question. Has anyone (published writer or otherwise) ever said WHY the Modrons go on their great march every however many years? I understand there was an old 2e module where it turns out the Modrons are marching early for some reason, but was it ever explained WHY they march across the planes?

The reason I ask is because I'm in the middle of running a campaign that I plan on eventually culminating in something big involving the Modrons, and I have an idea as to why they march across the planes every who knows when. Before I share anything, I just wanted to know if any of you have ever solved this problem before!

Any input would be most appreciated.

 

[Stormborn]

Next month's Dragon IIRC has an article on Modrons, maybe you will get your answer there.
If not, given their mechancial nature, it may be that the Modron's themselves don't know why they march and are looking for their own answers. Now I dont know a lot about them myself, nest to nothing actually, but here are some ideas:

-They are paraded through the planes as an example of order, so as to infect other races with axiomatic ideas.
-Their march is part of what actually keeps the planes aligned properly - they are a cosmic clock key and must march to keep creation moving as it should.
- An aspect of an axiomatic plane is in love with an aspect of an anarchic plane and started the modron march as a planar love poem or mix-tape.
- The march was intended to catalog the planes, with each modron gathering a tiny bit of data. However, the mechanisms for retriving this data are long gone and they keep marching anyway.
- A slipped cog in some primal modron. Its a bug, no more and no less.

 

[UltimaGabe]

Ooh- I didn't realize there was gonna be an article about that. I'll definitely check that out.

As for your ideas, those are neat- I especially like the clock key one.

As for my idea, I'll keep it simple so as not to give away everything- but, basically, the modrons themselves are physical manifestations of the mind of the long-dead god of law, and have been seeking, over the last thousands of years, to slowly put him back together.

What do you think?

 

[IcyCool]

You know, I can't for the life of me remember where I heard it, but I thought that the Modron's marched every few centuries to collect information about the great wheel and bring it back to Primus.

Ripzerai and Shemmy tend to be fonts of information about planar stuff. Maybe one of them will see this and stop in.

 

[coriolis]

It's funny, I was just re-reading the GMM adventure this week-end (one thing that struck me -- there are almost no maps). To get back to your question, it states in the adventure that the purpose for the march is mostly information-gathering. It's implied that Primus keeps records for all the planes, but that the Infinity Web doesn't reach everywhere, so the GMM is used to update those records.

I didn't see anything that would contradict with your interpretation.

 

[UltimaGabe]

Cool. So it would seem that, all this time, they've been scouring the planes for information regarding the reconstruction of this god, unknown to everyone else. And, by the end of this campaign, their regime slightly changes-they start tearing the planes themselves apart.

This will, of course, culminate in the PCs, hiding securely in the World Serpent Inn (Manual of the Planes web enhancement, recent Dragon article), are some of the few survivors after all of the planes have been completely destroyed, forced to somehow combat a resurrected god, as big as the multiverse itself, in order to keep all creation from being devoured.

How does that sound?

(Once again, there's a bit more to it than all of this, but I heard a while ago that anything you post on websites like this is, technically, property of the website's creator, and so I'm trying to keep my material mostly mine in case I ever want to do anything with it.)