Law, Chaos the Paladin PC and the Katechon

Regular readers will know that in the part of my brain labelled 'conceptual development' there is a box containing a lot of thoughts about an all-paladins campaign. This, I stress, would not be limited to campaigns in which all the PCs are paladins-proper in the stereotypical AD&D sense (though it could be that). It is a campaign in which the PCs are men and women for whom their honour is more important than their lives, and can therefore be of whatever class, background or type the DM and players desire. They are in other words best thought of as anti-rogues (if the Rogue is the basic OSR archetype):

Whether or not they gain power, fame and glory is immaterial to them; whether they accrue wealth is a matter beneath contempt. What matters to them is virtue: pursuing truthfulness, justice, protection of the weak. And in that pursuit they ask not the number or size of their enemies, the distance they must travel, or the hardships they must endure. They ask only what is right.

It is important to get away from too much pseudo-Christianity here: I would like the concept to be applicable in all kinds of settings and backgrounds. It is, however, hard to get away from the idea that it should be conneted to religious institutions of whatever kind - because I do think to make this kind of campaign work it is probably necessary for there to be some kind of institutional structure as such, and of which the PCs are members. This because they are precisely not rogues - they do not just gad about in the interests of wealth and fame. They are trying to protect something, and in a somewhat formalised way.

And in this respect there are some Christianised concepts which are helpful. One of them is the curious idea of the katechon (κατέχον), or 'he who restrains', mentioned in Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians, and often nowadays discussed in the context of the thought of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt, in The Nomos of the Earth, used this concept to describe the historical orientation of the medieval Christian empire. The katechon, as Paul describes it, is some power or person - his language is opaque because it seems he assumed the Thessalonians would already have known what he was talking about - who restrains the coming of the Antichrist and thus maintains the current historical epoch. Some day the katechon will disappear and the Antichrist, or 'lawlessness' will arrive. And this, for Schmitt, gave the Christian empire its orientation towards the idea of Rome as the katechon itself. Rome persists because it holds up the present eon. And as long as it does so, the Antichrist is at bay.

Stripped of its political theology and its explicit Christian furnishings, this is a great concept underpinning an everything-is-paladins campaign (and it of course informs, as you will have noticed, a huge amount of fantasy writings - everything from Tolkien's Gondor to GRRM's 'Wall' can be thought of as deriving by a long chain of Chinese whispers from the idea of the katechon) and presents us with a basic phenomenology (yes, I went there) of the anti-rogue campaign. In this phenomenology, we see:

A - The current epoch

B - The Antichrist

C - The katechon

And each is placed in relation to the others. B threatens to bring to an end A, but C intervenes. All you need to do, as the DM of your own campaign, is to decide what is A, what is B, and what is C.

Hence, A could be Hobbiton, B could be Sauron, and C could be the Dunedain. 

Or, A could be the Empire, B could be Chaos, and C could be Sigmar and his forces. 

Or, A could be the last city, B could be the su-monster hordes, and C could be the knights-protectors of the sacred dragon shield.

Or, A could be the university, B could be the demonic knowledge-devourers of old Cathay, and C could be the scholar-warriors of memasjkhajhjahas.

Or, A could be the utopia of Xanadu, B could be the crusading knights with their new religion, and C could be the shamanesses of the blue parrot.

And so on. The point here is that the threat which B poses ought to be epochal in nature and not just nasty or dangerous. It is not merely an evil power which raids, steals, or kills, but something which lurks just beyond the city wall or border, or just around the corner, or behind the reflection in the mirror, or whatever, and will Bring Everything To An End when it triumphs. And the PCs are likewise connected to a C which is not just 'the goodies' but some institution or set of institutions which are tied to the fate of the epoch as such. 

I think this would be fun to run and play and is deserving of further thought and systematisation.  

Games Workshop Against Satanism

An interesting theme is developing as the AI revolution unfolds: people don't have much of a problem with AI use in things they don't care about, but they hate it in anything they love. 

This I think explains why there is huge pushback against AI use in creative fields; ironically, despite having been told for a few years now that AI will replace human artists, novelists, film directors and so on, it seems more likely that these fields are among the few which are not going to be directly threatened. People can be entertained by slop, but people don't love slop, and when it comes to art, people want things they will love. This means they want things that other human beings have created.

It could just be the confirmation bias talking, but I was gladdened to read a number of articles last week (including in the mainstream press) about Games Workshop having banned its staff using AI in content generation or designs, and I see this as indicative of the direction in which we are travelling. Fans of Games Workshop products love them, and they don't want them to be AI-generated. These fans also particularly don't want to have to pay Games Workshop prices for AI content. And they will kick off good style if they discern AI content creeping in.

Games Workshop, like other outfits who want to build a reputation on the basis of quality, know this very well, and so I think do Wizards of the Coast - who have also taken a bold stance in public on this issue. This is not luddism; it is simply a feature of the human condition that most of us prefer things that other human beings have directly made, and in its own way no different from the market behaviour of wealthy people preferring handmade objects to those which are mass-produced. 

This all in any case gives a curious cast to the moral landscape of contemporary nerd commerce. Games Workshop is not our friend. But in this respect at least, it is an ally in the fight against Satan's forces. Much the same could be said about Wizards of the Coast. Not our friend. But, in this respect, an ally. All done out of self-centred motives, but nonetheless, not wrong. It's funny how things turn out.

When Did Action-Packed Prologues Begin?

Without further ado, let us commence the Great Monsters & Manuals Group Research Project 2026.

The 'prologue' as such is a concept that goes back at least to ancient Greece. But a fairly recent innovation in fantasy fiction has come in the form of the action-packed prologue chapter, often taking place in media res, which gets the reader hooked from the outset and tees up the narrative proper. I am not talking here about a framing device like the introductory sequence to The Worm Ouroboros, or a preliminary infodump like in The Fellowship of the Ring. I am talking about a teaser taking place 'before the opening credits', as it were, often filled with violence and derring-do and causing the pages to turn from the very outset.

The most famous and notable example nowadays may be the A Song of Ice and Fire books, which each begin in this way. Off the top of my head, others would include The Eye of the World, The Name of the Wind (which I confess I have not fully read), Gardens of the Moon, The Dragonbone Chair... if you have read a great deal of high fantasy fiction, you know the drill.

I have done some Googling, and even consulted Satan himself (in the form of Claude.AI for higher education, for which I have super-duper access through my day job) and have not been able to find a definitive starting point for this practice. I think it has to have become fashionable sometime between the publication of The Lord of the Rings and The Eye of the World. But when?

A datapoint: Pawn of Prophecy, the first volume in David Eddings's The Belgariad, includes a preliminary infodump prologue about the creation of the world. It was published in 1982, and it is safe to say that since Eddings was self-consciously trying to ape epic fantasy fiction, he can be used as a bellweather. This would indicate the action-packed prologue chapter was not in vogue at that time. The Eye of the World, which on the other hand definitively has what you would call an action-packed prologue chapter of the type I am describing, came out in 1990. This would narrow the search down to some point between 1982-1990. But I might be wrong.

Does anybody have any ideas? Fly, my pretties!