Knights & Knaves Alehouse

James Maliszewski wrote:

djeryv wrote:I use all 3 of the monster books. The one thing that annoys me about the MMII are the modrons...

I'm weird, I guess, because the modrons never bothered me. Granted, I've never actually used them in any adventure, so maybe that's why they don't bother me

The modrons are terrible and bland, not at all fitting with the mythic associations of "Nirvana," and feel very much like a "fill in the blanks" monster -- an attempt to "follow the pattern" of the demons/devils/daemons for another plane. For all of those reasons I've long suspected they were actually created by Frank Mentzer (who excelled at all that kind of stuff) but AFAIK he's never accepted credit/blame for them (the way he has for the Minimals and Pseudo-undead, i.e. the two other stupidest things in that book) so I suppose I could be wrong...

One point in the pseudo-undead's favor: non-undead Skeleton People...

I like the Modrons as some sort of inhuman preternatural robot-angels that maintain the metaphysical machinery of the universe.

T. Foster wrote:For all of those reasons I've long suspected they were actually created by Frank Mentzer (who excelled at all that kind of stuff) but AFAIK he's never accepted credit/blame for them (the way he has for the Minimals and Pseudo-undead, i.e. the two other stupidest things in that book) so I suppose I could be wrong...

FWIW, the modrons are not a Gygax creation, being the work of Jeff Grubb, as he admits here.

Planet Algol wrote:I like the Modrons as some sort of inhuman preternatural robot-angels that maintain the metaphysical machinery of the universe.

That's my take on them, too, which is why I've never minded them. I'm not sure they're particularly useful creatures (in terms of adventures, I mean), but I do find something strangely inspiring about them nonetheless.

James Maliszewski wrote:

T. Foster wrote:For all of those reasons I've long suspected they were actually created by Frank Mentzer (who excelled at all that kind of stuff) but AFAIK he's never accepted credit/blame for them (the way he has for the Minimals and Pseudo-undead, i.e. the two other stupidest things in that book) so I suppose I could be wrong...

FWIW, the modrons are not a Gygax creation, being the work of Jeff Grubb, as he admits here.

I hadn't seen that before, and it's nice to know from a "keeping everything I hate about the presentation of the Planes in AD&D in a single basket" perspective (since Jeff Grubb already bears the considerable blame associated with MotP). It still leaves open the question of where the initial idea for them (which apparently wasn't Grubb's - he just filled in the numbers of an existing concept) came from -- whether that bad and mythologically-speaking totally inappropriate idea came from Gygax himself (and if so why did he drop the stylistic ball so badly here when he'd done such a good job mining real-life mythology for the Nine Hells?) or from someone else (which could still be Mentzer, so he's not entirely out of the blame-woods yet...).

Yeah, the art of MMII is pretty uninspiring. It's interesting too that the few (2 I can think of) of DCSIII's monsters in it stand out - not for their quality necessarily, but for some weird layout/optical difference.

It's the useful thing that I am trying to get at - there's just not a lot of things that jumped out of either MMII of FF that struck me as being 'must haves' when these books came out. I'm going back through these books now in a effort to make some random encounter tables, and finding that I'm much more inclined to take the interesting aspects of some creatures and fold them into MM creatures - particularly the FF with so many low hit die humanoids - some of them are becoming goblin-variations for example. Same with undeads...

But there's still more reading to do!

I'm sure that the githyanki & githerazi saw use in peoples games through the 80's (I was out of the loop then),

T. Foster wrote:It still leaves open the question of where the initial idea for them (which apparently wasn't Grubb's - he just filled in the numbers of an existing concept) came from -- whether that bad and mythologically-speaking totally inappropriate idea came from Gygax himself (and if so why did he drop the stylistic ball so badly here when he'd done such a good job mining real-life mythology for the Nine Hells?) or from someone else (which could still be Mentzer, so he's not entirely out of the blame-woods yet...).

This might be a topic better suited to a thread of its own, but I don't think it implausible that the initial idea came from Gygax but was just developed in an "un-Gygaxian" way by Grubb. Gary always had a powerful penchant for systematization, with AD&D's Outer Planar structure being as much the result of a desire to map every possible shade of alignment to a plane as it is to anything remotely mythological. It can easily imagine that something like the modrons might seem to Gary to be perfect embodiments of absolute Lawful Neutrality, even if the execution isn't much like what he'd have done.

James Maliszewski wrote:

Planet Algol wrote:I like the Modrons as some sort of inhuman preternatural robot-angels that maintain the metaphysical machinery of the universe.

That's my take on them, too, which is why I've never minded them. I'm not sure they're particularly useful creatures (in terms of adventures, I mean), but I do find something strangely inspiring about them nonetheless.

I can imagine using them if someone started seriously messing up the universe with wishes, time travel and the like. Attempts at communication would be met with incomprehensible jargon about "antibody protocols initiated" and "stack overflow errors."

Maybe TSR had gotten big enough by then that someone in their legal department reminded them that monsters based upon human mythology could never be completely legally "owned" by TSR, but that a wholly new creation could.

Not what everyone wants in their gaming product, but considered in an IP vacuum the concept has its advantages.

I don't mind the whole clockwork concept for the LN planes, but I don't know that it should have been called "Nirvana", with all of that real world connotations. I'm not sure that mythological Nirvana really fits as a LN concept.

Edited - damn Mondays and their effect on my spelling/grammar.

I have found the MM2 useful, ever since it came out. Modrons, minimals & pseudo undead, not so much, but monster books have stinkers/filler in them. The pseudo-vampire or ghoul/ghast can actually be useful I suppose.

The S4 monsters, i1 monsters, demodands, devils, hags, barghest, even the s3 monsters & dragon ones all compiled was handy back them, though I can see how it is seen as being on TSR's downward slope.