Paladins are commonplace across fantasy roleplaying games. Typically appearing as knights in shining armour, these warriors are almost ubiquitous within games based on the Dungeons & Dragons rulesets – including the Eye of the Beholder, Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights series – and have appeared in a huge range of other games such as World of Warcraft and the Ultima, Quest for Glory, Gothic, The Bard’s Tale and Dragon Age series. As a result of their wide reach, these games have become important influences in the depiction of paladins within popular culture.
Various Paladins: Keldorn Firecam (Baldur’s Gate II) [Baldur’s Gate Fandom.com], Pallegina mes Rèi (Pillars of Eternity) [Pillars of Eternity Fandom.com], and Casavir (Neverwinter Nights 2) [NWN2 Fandom.com]
The paladins of these games are implicitly or explicitly holy warriors powered by the divine – almost always presented as servants of a pseudo-Christian God. These characters gain access to a range of abilities and powers with a divine theme and naming conventions including ‘Divine Smite’, ‘Holy Shield’ or ‘Consecration’. They are empowered to heal the sick by laying hands. They receive their powers and spells through prayer, typically allowing these abilities to be granted by their divine sponsor. Beyond this, the audio-visuals associated with these powers almost always lean heavily on Christian imagery with a propensity for shafts of light, halos, angelic wings, and monastic chant accompanying their use.
Paladin Under Influence of Avenging Crusader Spell (World of Warcraft) [WoWHead]
Within these games, paladins are also almost always morally upstanding. This is perhaps most firmly established through games following the earlier iterations of the Dungeons & Dragons rulesets (such as the early Baldur’s Gate games). These games often imported the alignment system of their tabletop forebears, requiring paladins to be Lawful Good (the stereotypically most noble alignment) and to maintain a righteous reputation: conducting too many evil acts and dropping too low on the karma meter would result in paladin allies deserting or attacking the player or, if the player character were a paladin would cause them to ‘fall’ losing their special abilities.
Paladins are clearly connected to crusading knights. This is immediately apparent through their knightly aesthetics: beyond their links to Christianity, many paladins are presented in armour styles associated with the Templars and other knightly orders. It is also evident through the naming conventions around their abilities such as ‘Crusaders Mantle’ or ‘Crusading Aura’.
This combination of tropes presents crusaders (paladins) as noble and performing the will of God and in doing so rather flattens the depiction of the crusades in these games. The paladin’s struggles are explicitly virtuous and implicitly supported by the divine and, conversely, their opponents must be evil and heathen. This, combined with the depiction of paladins as protectors, ties in with common clash of civilization narratives around the crusades, placing the Western paladins firmly in the right.
This depiction is not significantly mitigated where the paladin’s enemies are supernatural. Although a handful of exceptions exist (such as the conflict between the virtuous Paladins and nefarious Hashishin in the Gothic series), most roleplaying games make use of non-human characters as opponents, with paladins fighting pseudo-Christian demons, Tolkienesque Orcs and Goblins, or any number of other fantasy races. However, this mutates rather than removes the clash of civilizations narrative: the crusading paladins are still in conflict with another culture, one which is explicitly and often irredeemably evil. Moreover, as many of these fantasy races are coded as non-Western, the clash of civilizations narrative is further emphasised.
This is carried over to the appearance of paladins in a handful of games outside the roleplaying genre. The Total War: Warhammer series incorporates paladins as leaders of a series of factions (the Knights of Origo, Thegan’s Errantry and Chevaliers de Lyonesse) originating from Bretonnia (pseudo-France) explicitly engaged in a crusade against the forces of darkness in Araby (a fantasy version of the Holy Land). While this crusade is conducted primarily against factions of the undead with an ancient Egyptian aesthetic, the tropes remain intact.
Undead Forces Attacking Thegan’s Crusaders (Total War: Warhammer II) [Total War Warhammer Fandom.com]
There’s some potential to explore and critique these depictions of noble crusading knights – indeed we see a lot of this in other genres, the action orientated Dante’s Inferno is a particular example – but this is largely shallow in roleplaying games. The most prominent exploration is through narrative and mechanics around falling which provide a tangible consequence for paladins who do not live up to their moral expectations. But even here, the factors which trigger a fall are often arbitrary and almost always permit the unrestrained slaughter of designated ‘enemies’. More generally, the paladin, and by implication the crusading knight, is still an idealised righteous and holy warrior: by definition if they cease to be so, they are no longer a true paladin. Moreover, fallen paladins are very much a rarity within these games: most paladins remain righteous.
To go further and create a more considered approach to the crusades and crusading, roleplaying games need to have a reckoning with their systems of morality. While these games often provide complex discussion of ethical issues through their choice based systems and moral quandaries, morality is still a blunt instrument in many respects. What makes a good and evil action often appears arbitrary or inconsistent. Moreover, roleplaying games still tend to default to always chaotic evil opponents for their lawful good heroes to defeat. There’s certainly potential to overcome these issues and develop more nuanced accounts of conflicts such as the crusades, but this is seldom realised.
The paladin is at the heart of this issue. As paragons of virtue and obvious analogues for crusading knights, they represent an embedding of a particular view of the crusades and crusaders which is particularly hard to avoid, even in games which take steps to avoid this link.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for example mitigates the core connection between paladins and crusading knights through its plethora of classes and subclasses: a range of classes fit the classic depiction of the armoured crusader including Cavaliers (a close fit for knights in shining armour), certain varieties of Warpriest (including most notably the Champion of the Faith), (unintuitively) the Hellknight Prestige class, and the Crusader subclass of Cleric. Each of these classes bears obvious aesthetic and narrative similarities with different aspects of crusading knights allowing a broader and more complex depiction of their motivations and behaviour. This combined with the variety of characters of all classes and backgrounds engaged the crusade at the heart of the game gives a somewhat more nuanced depiction.
Cavalier, Warpriest and Paladin (Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous) [Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous — Guide and Walkthrough, Chris Williams, GameFAQs.com]
Nevertheless, roleplaying games are still limited by the prominence of the paladin. The notion of the paladin is firmly tied to the image of the crusaders within the popular mindset (at least amongst large sections of the gaming community) and it may be impossible to fully divorce the two. To fully engage with the crusades it may be time to retire the paladin.
I’ve been doing questions for three days so sorry Rob that you’re getting my one “this is a comment not a question” for this year – I sort of simultaneously agree and disagree with this. I absolutely take all the points made here but I guess my view is partly that, as regards retiring the paladin entirely, that ship has probably sailed: we could all ban paladins in our own D&D games, but we’re not the people we need to reach here in terms of getting people to think about paladinhood, crusading, and what those things mean.
I do also think there’s a bit more complexity out there already than you give complete credit for. I’ve definitely seen e.g. TTRPG podcasters talk about ideas for very much non-European, less Christian inspired ideas for divinely ordained warrior-heroes, for example, which I think could be a productive approach. I think we might also need to think more about the “dark crusader” or negative paladin archetype – I don’t agree that this is a rarity, I think it’s pretty established by this point. The Grey Wardens are very obviously an order of paladins even if Dragon Age doesn’t use that term, as in other ways are the Templars, and both are very, very often on the wrong side morally throughout those games in ways that the game is pretty clear about. And then there’s the Woedican Steel Garrotte in Avowed, very much the zealot paladin played as full villain. Those representations have their own problems, of course, but I don’t think we can boil the paladin down to “paladins are represented as being morally correct” any more, and it’s relatively rare that the sort of early D&D objective morality systems crop up much in actual CRPGs and play nowadays.
So whilst I totally see where the “maybe it’s time to retire the Paladin” comes from, I think we need to remember that as medievalists we’re all exhausted by misuse of the crusades and we’re not seeing it through the same lens as most people. I wonder if there are more productive ways forward that centre more on providing people with different ideas of what paladins can or should be, especially non-European ideas or people whose ‘paladinhood’ is less tied to Crusader-style orders or state models. We could also look at different ideas of what crusaders can be or were that don’t fit the paladin model, or explore those in different ways (“what do you mean, the banking and diplomacy service is all run by paladins”). Paladins are actually famously annoying in D&D play because they so often end up being the party policeman – giving people something cooler and more interesting than that has a potential role, I think, and is something where historians could have a more useful role in helping build different possibilities. My sense is that that exploration is more likely to make an impact from our end than trying to persuade people to take out that “religious warrior” niche altogether, because we’d be giving people a way to open up and complicate those stories rather than to not tell them.
I guess to the extent there’s a question here, it’s “do you have a sense of how a ‘retire the paladin’ push would work, and if not, what’re your thoughts on the above as an alternative”?