Paladin Thoughts

In our Friday game, we're playing D&D 5E with a relatively new GM, with a fascinating campaign concept: the PCs are legendary heroes pulled from the past to deal with a great threat ... unfortunately, they were pulled from the timestream before they could become the legends. I decided that I would play a Paladin but wanted to do something slightly different and came up with a concept: the Traitor-Knight. Essentially, in his past-future, he would go on to become reviled by most of the populace due to his siding with the losers of the inevitable war that leads to the current status quo.

But that's not what this post is really about. Instead, I wanted to throw out some interesting musings on Holy Knights like this.

Having spent entirely too much time yesterday reading through the Psi-Wars stuff by Mailanka, I was influenced by his Communion take, specifically with regards to the whole avatar thing. Related to this was a scene in the Dresden Files book, Changes, while Karrin Murphy is wielding Fidelacchius, one of the Swords. When facing some super vampires with major mind mojo, she cries out:

"False gods!" she cried, her blue eyes blazing as she stared at the Red King and the Lords of Outer Night. "Pretenders! Usurpers of truth! Destroyers of faith, of families, of lives, of children! For your crimes against the Mayans, against the peoples of the world, now will you answer! Your time has come! Face judgement Almighty!"

Okay, so this is pretty standard for a paladin, yeah? I mean, it isn't hard to believe a paladin would exclaim this sort of thing, right? The very next sentence is what made me go "Hmm..."

I think I was the only one close enough to see the shock in her eyes, and I realized that it wasn't Murphy speaking the words - but someone else speaking them through her.

So, what if, when a paladin channels his or her deity's holy might, what he or she is actually doing is opening himself to become (albeit temporarily) his or her deity's literal avatar?

This is definitely something that bears further investigation, particularly since I'm likely going to be running Dungeon Fantasy for the Saturday group in the near future ...