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Paladins: Holy Warriors of Many Colors
- The paladin class offers players in the AD&D game an opportunity
to roleplay a character who epitomizes the cardboard hero of myth
and legend, the warrior of truth, justice and the American way.
However exciting this may seem to a beginning AD&D player, not
many gaming sessions pass before a player begins to wonder if,
in the predominantly pantheistic religious setting of most campaign
worlds (both official game worlds published by TSR and those created
by individual DMs), gods and goddesses of non-lawful good alignment
have heroes of their own. The answer to this question is emphaticly,
“Yes!” Much like the specialist mage who becomes an expert in
a particular school of magic, the paladin may become a “specialist”
also, a champion of his faith or alignment -- whatever color it
might be.
- The Player’s Handbook describes the paladin as “a noble and heroic
warrior, the symbol of all that is right and true in the world.
As such, he has high ideals that he must maintain at all times.”
This description is only partly true. While a paladin has high
ideals, he is not necessarily a “noble” or “heroic” warrior and
he may just as easily represent the wrongful falsehood in the
world as all right and true. Perhaps a more accurate description
of the paladin would be “a planar champion, the symbol of all
that is right and true in the eyes of his diety. As such, he has
firm ideals that he must maintain at all times.”
- Alignment, like all other things, is relative. What a lawful good
diety would consider to be right and “good,” a chaotic evil diety
might consider wrong and evil. A chaotic neutral diety views “law”
as chaos, and “chaos” as law. Therefore, in a very real sense
paladins of all alignments are “lawful good” in the eyes of their
diety and others who follow the paladin's religion. In the world
of the Aztecs for example, human sacrifice was considered to be
a holy deed. Sacrifice kept their god, Hiutzilopotchli, alive
and gave nourishment for his divine body. The Spaniards, on the
other hand, detested this practice and condemned it as dispicable
and evil.
- A paladin can be of any alignment provided he maintains the values
and mores of that alignment with fervor beyond that commonly displayed
by the ordinary man. Paladins are warriors dedicated to a specific
deity or group of deities. They defend the faith in word and deed.
A paladin epitomizes the ethos of the faith he or she defends
and can suffer no detour from that faith or risk loosing the special
powers granted by his or her god. The paladin must choose a patron
deity and follow that deity’s alignment. Paladins of good dieties
have powers designed to foil evil, chaotic paladins to foil law,
etc.,.
- Many of the heroes of myth and legend described in Legends and
Lore could could be characterized as paladins of other than lawful
good alignment. For example, Legends and Lore describes Qawaaz,
a neutral good hero from American Indian mythology, as being “the
ideal for all warriors to emulate.” Axayatl, a neutral evil hero
of Aztec mythology, is described as “an avid worshiper of the
Aztec patron deity, Huitzilopochtli, ” because of his leadership
the Aztec religion reached its highest state. Cu Chulainn, the
chaotic good Celt, is characterized as traveling the Celtic lands
“to stamp out injustice.” The descriptions in Legends and Lore
do not reveal much about the devotion these heroes had to a deity,
with the exception of Axayatl, but they do reveal an adherence
to high ideals corresponding to the heroes’ alignments, and therefore
could be taken as examples of non-lawful good paladins.
- The following text describes paladins of the nine different alignments
and the special powers and hinderances specific to each type.
The powers of the differently aligned paladins are based on the
characteristics of the planes (and their dieties) which are most
closely associated with the different alignmnets. The first edition
Manual of the Planes and material from the Planescape setting
is a valuable reference for adding further flesh to the paladin’s
motivating ethos. This manual may also provide the DM with useful
information that can be used to help design adventures pitting
the paladin against diametrically opposing forces. The plane of
Nirvana and its dieties would be the venerated by a lawful neutral
paladin, lawful goods, the Seven Heavens; neutral goods, Elysium;
chaotic goods, Olympus; chaotic neutrals, Limbo; chaotic evils,
the Abyss; neutral evils, Hades; lawful evils, the Nine Hells;
and neutrals, the Concordant Opposition.
 
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