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.