Dungeons & Dragons
Playing Against Type: Evil Paladins in D&D
Depending on play-style, home rules, or if you’re playing in an official league like Adventurer’s League, alignment can be a very important part of character creation in Dungeons & Dragons. Race, class, and alignment need to fit together sensibly and can all influence how you play your character. The way these factors work together varies across the game’s very long history and numerous editions, but my experience is with fifth edition (AKA 5e), so we’ll focus on that for now.
For the uninitiated, alignment basically describes your character’s morality and attitude. You combine lawful, neutral, or chaotic with good, neutral, or evil to get alignments like lawful evil, chaotic neutral, or neutral good. So the idea of “evil” can manifest itself in multiple ways. A lawful evil character, for example, would achieve their ends through means tempered by tradition, order, or some other guiding principle. It’s evil with standards, you could say. By comparison, a chaotic good character will do whatever they think is the right thing and aren’t concerned by societal norms or arbitrary rules. [1]
Some classes seem like they are destined for one specific alignment: Warlocks are evil, paladins are good, and bards are chaos incarnate. But that’s simply not the case — any class can fall under any alignment, as long as there is a backstory that makes sense for it.
Paladins are an especially good example of this. Comparable to the archetypical knight in shining armor, paladins are holy warriors who have sworn an oath to fight evil, often in the name of a specific god or other powerful entity. [1] As such, paladins are rarely evil (though, it must be noted, “rarely” does not mean “never”). A paladin who strays from the path of their oath can lose their powers, forcing the player to pick a new class, or they might need to seek absolution and redemption through a cleric following their same deity. Often, these cases of straying from the path involve a misstep, a choice between the lesser of two evils, or a similarly difficult situation. [1]
However, there are also paladins who may willfully turn from their oath and their path. In these cases, players may choose to follow a new path — the Oathbreaker paladin. [1] An example of this class variant can be found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, though there are homebrew versions available as well. [2]
One well-known example of an Oathbreaker paladin is Arkhan the Cruel, played by actor Joe Manganiello. He makes appearances in several D&D web series, including Critical Role, CelebriD&D, and the Wizards of the Coast’s Stream of Annihilation.[3] Arkhan began as a lawful good paladin, but his alignment changed to lawful evil when he became an Oathbreaker paladin in the service of Tiamat,[3] an evil deity known as the Scaled Tyrant.[4] He again switched alignments to become neutral evil due to his actions in Critical Role (though I won’t get into the details of that here. Spoilers!)
What’s notable about Arkhan as an evil paladin is that he views his own actions as altruistic. He serves Tiamat in the interest of defeating Asmodeus, the Lord of the Hells.[5] He believes the universes that Asmodeus manipulates can be destroyed if Tiamat is freed, thus restoring balance to the world.[3] So even though Arkhan serves an evil god and does evil things for this purpose, in his view he is doing good — or at least undoing a greater evil.
This highlights an important perspective to keep in mind if you’re ever looking at creating an evil paladin: Who defines what evil looks and acts like? And who draws the line on what’s “too evil” or what’s “for the greater good”? Differences in perspective and personal morality are not only a great way to add depth and complexity to the character you create and play, but they also open up a lot of opportunities to play archetypically “good” classes in their total opposite alignment.
While there are certainly common tropes for specific class-alignment pairings, that’s not to say that they can never be subverted and played with in unexpected ways. Players shouldn’t shy away from what seems fun or interesting to them when creating their characters in favour of towing the line of convention. After all, Dungeons & Dragons is all about the game and the story. The rules are just there to guide us.
Sources:
1) Cordell, Bruce R., Jeremy Crawford, Robert Schwalb, and James Wyatt. 2014. Player’s Handbook. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast LLC.
2) Wiki Contributors. 2019a. ‘Oathbreaker, Variant (5e Subclass).’ D&D Wiki. Retrieved September 26, 2019 (https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Oathbreaker,_Variant_(5e_Subclass)).
3) Wiki Contributors. 2019b. ‘Arkhan.’ Critical Role Wiki. Retrieved September 27, 2019 (https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Arkhan).
4) Wiki Contributors. 2019c. ‘Tiamat.’ Critical Role Wiki. Retrieved September 27, 2019 (https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Tiamat).
5) Wiki Contributors. 2019d. ‘The Lord of the Hells.’ Critical Role Wiki. Retrieved September 27, 2019 (https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Hells).
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Originally published to Vocal in 2019.
