Great Modron March - Introduction & Chapter 1 Review

A few years ago, I picked up a PDF of the Great Modron March from the DMs Guild and then was busy running other games. Then, early last year I opened it and was immediately dreaming of getting to run it. Since I’d been playing in a 2nd Edition AD&D al-Qadim game, I decided that I wanted to run it with the 2nd edition rules it was originally intended for. A quick poll of my local players showed that I was going to struggle to get a consistent group to run in person, so I turned to Roll20 and haven’t looked back.

I’ve now run 15 sessions of the campaign, using Great Modron March as the backbone and weaving in other classic Planescape modules as well, notably The Eternal Boundary, Harbinger House and The Well of Worlds, and I would re-run this campaign in a heartbeat. I’ll review more of Great Modron March, as well as the other modules but this post will focus on an overview of the module and its first chapter.

Introduction and Background

As a Planescape fiend (pun intended), it was hard not to get sucked in by the allure of the Great Modron March… Eleven linked adventures that span from level 1 to 10 that take the PCs around the Great Wheel of the Outer Planes? Just that sounds fantastic, and that’s before diving deeper in. One thing I’ve noticed that sets the Planescape modules apart from other 1st and 2nd edition modules I’ve read is their organization. Most of them have a DM introduction, a synopsis and other bits that just make prepping much easier, and Great Modron March definitely benefits from these things. There is a great introductory chapter, a separate story prologue and then each chapter starts with a section called “Just the Facts, Berk” that lays out the Number of PCs, Levels, PCs Preferred, Factions involved and a Synopsis. This makes each chapter easy to run with relatively minimal prep.
One thing that I noticed as I read the entire module before beginning the campaign was the numerous hooks that a canny DM could seed, and so I put together a list of hooks for the players to choose hooks for their PCs that were interesting to them. Below is an abbreviated list of the hooks I pulled from the Great Modron March.

Hooks

• Ydemi Jysson - a clerk at the Hall of Speakers in Sigil (Contact)
• Hearth’s Faith, a small town on the plane of Mount Celestia
• Sir Vaimish Crasad - a Paladin lord of the gatetown of Excelsior (Contact/Mentor)
• The Tacharim - an evil order of nomadic knights that plagues the Outlands (Antagonist)
• Lil’z Rou - Githzerai Sensate namer. (Contact)
• Xaldra Miloni - Tiefling Indep and well-lanned party girl. (Contact)
• Bachalis - Half-elf Indep Wizard – (Contact/Mentor)
• Erinos Vail - Athar Mage in Rigus – (Contact/Mentor)

Another enticing prospect was the episodic nature of the module, where each chapter is reasonably self-contained and allows for other adventures to take place between the chapters of the Modron March. This has let me easily weave the other modules in, resulting in the chronology below.

Session	- Module (Sessions are approximately 4-5 hours long)
1	Great Modron March Chapter 1
2	Eternal Boundary
3	Eternal Boundary
4	Eternal Boundary
5	Great Modron March Chapter 2
6	Great Modron March Chapter 3
7	Great Modron March Chapter 3
8	Well of Worlds Hard Time
9	Harbinger House
10	Harbinger House
11	Harbinger House
12	Harbinger House
13	Harbinger House
14	Harbinger House
15	Harbinger House
16	Great Modron March Chapter 4

More Spoilers for Great Modron March follow…

Chapter 1: The March Begins

I shouldn’t like Chapter 1 one as much as I do, as it springs the plot of the module on the PCs unexpectedly at the last moment and features a fair bit of NPC/Dungeon Master Theater, but the set up and execution works far better than it should.

Part of what works so well is that this adventure feels like a Planescape adventure, leaning heavily onto the idea of Petitioners, gate towns and wonder. The initial impetus, of an NPC the PCs would have known dying, his soul travelling to the Beastlands, the outer plane that best matches his alignment, and being reborn there as a cat is fantastic. As is the idea that back when he was mortal he had an intelligent book that he never paid off fully. So Ydemi, our erstwhile cat, his memories erased, finds himself in Sigil on an errand, with this intelligent book (referred to as ‘The Book’, natch) filling him in on how he owes this debt to a wizard in the gate-town of Automata and everything goes from there. The Book uses magic to contact and draw the PCs to Ydemi’s former shop and the two NPCs offer the PCs all of Ydemi’s mortal money in exchange for returning the Book to his maker, Heiron Lifegiver.

That necessitates going through a portal to the gate-town of Automata, drawing in more classic Planescape lore where the Gate-towns of the Outlands are built around a gate to an Outer Plane (that’s the planes dedicated to an alignment rather than to an element like the plane of Fire or other ‘Inner’ planes). These gate-towns, being so tied to the plane on the other side of the Gate, take on some of that plane’s characteristics and even fall through, moving wholecloth onto the other plane if they become too congruent to the Outer plane. Chapter One offers plenty to work with here to give the feeling both of a Gate-town tied to the plane of ultimate order with bureaucratic follies for the PCs to make sure the correct paperwork is filed for their visit and also the underbelly of a gate-town with the Council of Anarchy working perpendicular to the PCs and showing them why Automata has not slid into Mechanus.

Without spoiling too much more, the PCs get to engage in some investigation, interact with wary NPCs and then find their way to Heiron Lifegiver’s secret abode. This last bit felt the most forced, as it is set up in the adventure to be a bit of NPC theater as the Council of Anarchy uses the PCs to lead them to Heiron and the party is caught in the cross-fire of the battle only to have the battle interrupted/ended by the unexpected start of the Great Modron March.

The Good

• The adventure is a great introduction to several classic Planescape concepts, like Gate-towns and Petitioners. The adventure also does well at showing that a Planescape game is much less about combat than many other D&D games can be, with the confrontation at the end the only unavoidable combat.
• The bureaucratic comedy of the complicated and voluminous laws of Automata plays well.
• The hook of the PCs all knowing the same NPC, Ydemi, makes it easy to assemble a disparate set of individuals into a party.

The Bad

• As well as it works for this chapter, I still find myself wishing these older Planescape modules had less DM-fiat/NPC theater, which the climax falls into.
• I’m also not a big fan of the plot reveal, with the fact that the campaign would revolve around the Great Modron March being a surprise to players. I left that as a surprise for this campaign, but I think if I ran it in the future, I would just tell players and then leave them to wonder when the march would begin.

The Ugly

•  Since I’m running this online using Roll20, it was very frustrating to discover that the map of Automata in the module bears no resemblance to the map of Automata in the Player’s Primer to the Oultands.