Regular readers will know that I harbour a long-simmering ambition to write up rules for running explicitly heroic campaigns oriented around the idea either that all PCs are of the paladin class or that all PCs are conceptually 'paladins' in the sense of fighting against evil.
A long series of irregular posts, which I really ought to assemble under their own tag, lays this out:
- Into the Abyss: More on Being the Good Guys
- Random Demonic Incursion Generator Test Case
- The Incursion Generator Expanded
- The Single Class Paladin Campaign
- Single Class Paladin Campaign Book - First Glimpse
- The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants
- Feel like my soul is beginning to expand - look into my heart and you will sort of understand
- Space Paladins in the Demonic Future
As you will see if you carefully read these posts (as all true disciples of the Order of Noisms must do, and indeed must already have done dozens of times) I've suggested a variety of models of such campaigns, which ideally I would like to write up as a series of volumes the, if I have my druthers, would come out in a posh slip-case finely decorated:
- The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
- A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
- A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits
- A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
- A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
- A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
- A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
- Space Paladines in the demonic future
- A Beowulf-inspired 'Clan of Cain' scenario
The main idea here is that each of these scenarios involves some systematised way (on which notes can be found in the pieces linked to above) through which incursions of evil find their way into the human world and have to be rooted out, uncovered, battled, etc., by said paladins.
A friend of mine recently raised the issue of David Lynch and his sad (fairly) recent death, and I immediately started to see a connection between this type of campaign and Lynch's approach to what we could call 'worldbuilding'. I am obviously here talking about Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me most of all, but I think across most of Lynch's ouevre we see a similar concern playing out - the idea that, lurking around every corner, behind every closed door, reflected in every mirror, hiding at the foot of each bed, waiting at the bottom of every car park, there might be something supernaturally and unspeakably awful. This is I think most readily 'gameable' in Twin Peaks, which in a way almost reads like the Actual Play Report to the world's greatest Unknown Armies campaign: evil entities from interdimensional 'lodges' come to the human world to do dastardly things and law enforcement tries to cope with the fallout. But in its own way Blue Velvet follows a similar pattern - and even A Straight Story has a very mild hint of that flavour, with the main character taking on the quality of a roving wizard casting spells to solve people's slightly otherworldly problems (like the woman who keeps mysteriously killing deer by accident).
In this paradigm the PCs could take on something of a Kyle McLachlanian aspect as straight-jawed Philip Marlowe-investigator types, but this is by no means a pre-requisite and one could paint with a much broader brush than that. What is chiefly needed - and as I have begun to lay out - is a means by which to systematise the crucial mechanism of intrusion: how evil manifests itself in the setting through some at least partially random method, and how it is that the PCs encounter it.
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