7 thoughts on “#PaladinWeek”

  1. Waaaay back in the day, playing 1st Ed. AD&D.

    We’d been fighting a powerful vampire sorceress and her vampire minions on and off for months. We were the group of heroes who’d been steadfastly defending the innocent townsfolk against the vampire attacks.

    Gradually the vampire sorceress turned all the members of the group to her side, by turning them into vampires and offering them power and riches. I remember she’d finally got one of the last remaining key members of the group to turn (or at least persuaded him not to fight her any more I, can’t quite remember)

    My paladin had stood fast against the evil throughout, resisting all attempts to corrupt him and continuing to protect the town. But now it came down to the final showdown. The vampires attacked the town in earnest.

    With the rest of the group either gone or with the enemy now, and hordes of vampires descending on the town, I remember gathering the frightened townsfolk into the crypt of the church as the hordes howled for us outside.

    I remember my paladin stood in the centre of the church, holy avenger at the ready, back to back with the chaotic neutral thief (who’d stayed to fight because fuck it…) as the vampires battered at the doors. There was no one left to fight against the tides of darkness, except Thornton the paladin and Organic Storm the thief.

    Back to back, in the centre of the church, with the townsfolk they had sworn to protect cowering in the crypt, with our former allies attacking us along side the howling vampires. The last stand against the forces of evil. It was a very powerful moment. Betrayed by all our friends, outgunned, outnumbered, but still fighting for the light. That is my personal favourite paladin moment.

    And that was where we left it. We ended the game on that awesome moment. Which was a stroke of genius in my opinion. There was nowhere more awesome for the game to go. We all knew the two last heroes were fucked. We all knew that Thornton would fight to the bitter end, and maybe Organic Storm would think “fuck it” and bail and maybe he wouldn’t. We all knew what was going to happen. We didn’t need to see it. And not seeing it always left that beautiful ray of hope… “What if…?”

  2. I was the GM of a (heavily house-ruled) game of D&D (BECMI/Cyclopedia).

    One player had a male Elf who was in love with a female paladin NPC.

    One day the player said, casually talking about the game: “I’d like to give her a present, but please don’t tell her”. I looked at him and we both bursted in laugh.

    (of course he meant “to not take this into account in advance when we’ll be playing”… XD )

  5. Back in my glory days I got to play a game of The Riddle of Steel run by Christopher Kidner  in which I played Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. Joseph Osborn played my Ithaqua worshiping hireling and We set out through the American Colonies to crush evil.

    My favorite moment was when during the… purification of a town of heretics we entered the abandoned church to find a woman weeping behind the altar. After explaining to us that the town had fed its children to something they found in the mines she told us, tears streaming down her face, “God isn’t here any more…” To which I looked the GM straight in the eye and deadpanned: “No. But I am.” 

  6. The Campaign: Clockwork Moon, a home-brew dimension-hopping setting with home-brew point-buy anything-goes system. 

    The Paladin: John Petterson, an explorer / military engineer from Victorian Speampunk Britain who through earlier sessions earned the title of “Paladin of Ash”, traveling with a magical treasure hunter Dylan Green and symbiotic psychic entity Zane Mankowski.

    The Situation:  Complicated series of events led to our GM Christopher Kidner pulling each player aside for a solo scene, where we found ourselves in a modern psychiatric hospital.  The doctor there explained that I had been delusional for years, and that all my party members and adventures had been products of my imagination.  He even brought me to visit my wife and daughter, who I had seen killed by my nemesis, a savage nature spirit which may or may not have been a repressed part of my own psyche (long story).  The doctor explained that to destroy the illusion and return to the real world, I need to kill those who are holding me in the fantasy, my friends.  Initially tempted by the prospect of returning to my family and a release from the general bizareness of the campaign, I rejected it after realizing the risks and costs.  Better that I continue to suffer and my family lives without me than I kill my allies for what may be itself a delusion.  This lead to a hearkbreaking scene I had to explain to my daughter why her father couldn’t come home yet.

  7. My wife’s paladin came up with all kinds of innovative ways to lock down combat and keep enemies engaged with her.

    She got the Immovable Rod pretty early in our game and my favorite moment was when she taunted a giant wyrm into swallowing her so she could activate the Rod. When the Artificer blasted the wyrm backward, the Immovable Rod stayed immovable and burst out the side of the wyrm with the Paladin hanging off of it covered in gore. 

    She also came across a magical githyanki silvered sword that had an interdimensional space that she could use to capture an enemy after striking them. My favorite moment was when a two headed white dragon was trying to flee a combat and she decided to try and throw her sword at the dragon to seal it in and prevent it’s escape. 

    Nobody escapes our Paladin.

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