Work continues on the Paladin Project, my ongoing effort to come up with an OSR 'good guys' campaign toolbox. Regular readers may recall my last post on this subject, in which I described the phenomenology of the anti-rogue campaign. The nuts and bolts of this remain, but I am now positively steering clear of the 'anti-rogue' motif and am accentuating the positive: this is not anti- anything. It is a campaign style revolving around Paladins, conceived not as a single class but as a character archetype: a paladin is a man or woman for whom their honour is more important than their lives.
The phenomenology of the Paladin campaign concerns a relationship between three phenomena, which for illustrative purposes I labelled:
A - The Current Epoch (meaning the status quo which is desired to be preserved - A is Hobbiton; it is Gondor; it is the Empire of Warhammer; it is Lanthanum Chromate; it is the world before the flood; it is Rorke's Drift; it is the high plains of North America threatened by encroaching Europeans; it is Tenochtitlan on the eve of Cortez's arrival; it is Muslim Grenada under assault from the Spanish; it is the Kingdom of Asturias threatened by the Islamic host; it is Hogwarts threatened by Voldemort's return; it is wherever there is a particular place or way of life which the PC wish to protect).
B - The Antichrist (meaning that which threatens A in apocalyptic terms - B is Sauron; it is generalised Chaos; it is the giants who live beneath the ocean; it is the conquistadors; it is Voldemort; it is the Old Dark Gods; it is Winter; it is the Princes of the Fae; it is whatever is threatening, whether through force or more insidious means, to destroy or overturn that which the PCs are sworn to preserve).
C - The Katechon (meaning the order, however formally or informally organised, to which the PCs belong, initially at the bottom rung: it could be a knightly order, a loose affiliation of heroes and apprentices, a cabal of magic-users, a school of philosophers, an underground movement, a caste of warrior-monks, an elite clan of assassins, a band of holy eunuchs or courtesans, whatever - it is that thing which protects A from B).
The important point to emphasise here is that A, B and C can have any furniture you wish, and cab also change in substance as time goes on, provided that the phenomena of A, B and C exist in that pattern and relationship. For example, I'm very taken with the idea at the moment of running a campaign in a tropical, jungle setting - all sweltering heat and life-thronged forest. I might decide that here A is a city state that sits on an island at the mouth of a great river, B is an empire of su-monsters ruled by a new God-Empress bent on suberting the city and eventually turning it to her worship, both by infiltrating it with her agents and also by waging a sort of relentless psychological warfare campaign against its inhabitants to slowly drive them all insane, and C is an order of jaguar-priests who are attempting to combat this quasi-siege.
But equally, I might decide that A is a tribe of thunder-worhipping steppe nomads, B is a pseudo-Chinese bureaucratic empire bent on conquest, and C are the camel-riding warrior elite who protect the undersky homeland.
And if I fancy a bit of nostalgia I might just go full TSR: A is the Kingdom of Oakeneshott, B is the forces of chaos boiling up from the Underdark, and C is the Order of the Phoenix Knights.
The point is that the game lives in the relationship between A, B and C and is operationalised through embedding the PCs within C and A, and ensuring that B is a varied, and unpredictable threat not governed by DM fiat but by emergent properties and tables. It is vitally important that C is properly elaborated because I envisage it as the mechanism by which the PCs earn XP and advance, where they train, where they deposit treasure, where they derive their values from, and so on. And that must also be properly elaborated in its relationship to A, which has to feel like a living, breathing entity rather than just a dot on a map. The book in other words mostly consists of ways to make A, B, and C fully fleshed out, interesting, intricate and deep.
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