The newest excerpt from D&D 4th Edition, “Archons“, is kinda uninspiring. Some ice dudes. And some fire dudes. The thing I find the most humorous is that they brag, “Now that we’ve (thankfully!) separated the word “elemental” in the D&D sense from the classical Greek elements of earth, fire, air, and water, there’s plenty of room for archons of your own design.”
Apparently they haven’t changed it too much – in this excerpt and in Worlds & Monsters they show earth, air, fire, and water archons. Yay to their oft-repeated goal of “moving away from bogus parallelism.” Anyway, it’s hard to take them too much to task because I don’t mind the classical elements, it’s just funny to have such a trivial example of a common problem in 4e – how their design goals sound good but their implementation leaves you going “WTF?”.
Anyway, they have a page of PDF from the Monster Manual with two ice archons. As is usual for the new MM, it goes with their new weird super-trademarkey stat block format and little to no useful fluff. The archons aren’t bad, just “elemental soldiers,” but they’re certainly not groundbreaking. 3/5.
Geek Related 