Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition, AD&D 2nd edition Character creation: Kits and Classes, Warrior, paladin (alternate alignments)
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Paladins: Holy Warriors of Many Colors

The paladin class offers players in the AD&D game an opportunity to roleplay a character who epitomizes the cardboard hero of myth and legend, the warrior of truth, justice and the American way. However exciting this may seem to a beginning AD&D player, not many gaming sessions pass before a player begins to wonder if, in the predominantly pantheistic religious setting of most campaign worlds (both official game worlds published by TSR and those created by individual DMs), gods and goddesses of non-lawful good alignment have heroes of their own. The answer to this question is emphaticly, “Yes!” Much like the specialist mage who becomes an expert in a particular school of magic, the paladin may become a “specialist” also, a champion of his faith or alignment -- whatever color it might be.
The Player’s Handbook describes the paladin as “a noble and heroic warrior, the symbol of all that is right and true in the world. As such, he has high ideals that he must maintain at all times.” This description is only partly true. While a paladin has high ideals, he is not necessarily a “noble” or “heroic” warrior and he may just as easily represent the wrongful falsehood in the world as all right and true. Perhaps a more accurate description of the paladin would be “a planar champion, the symbol of all that is right and true in the eyes of his diety. As such, he has firm ideals that he must maintain at all times.”
Alignment, like all other things, is relative. What a lawful good diety would consider to be right and “good,” a chaotic evil diety might consider wrong and evil. A chaotic neutral diety views “law” as chaos, and “chaos” as law. Therefore, in a very real sense paladins of all alignments are “lawful good” in the eyes of their diety and others who follow the paladin's religion. In the world of the Aztecs for example, human sacrifice was considered to be a holy deed. Sacrifice kept their god, Hiutzilopotchli, alive and gave nourishment for his divine body. The Spaniards, on the other hand, detested this practice and condemned it as dispicable and evil.
A paladin can be of any alignment provided he maintains the values and mores of that alignment with fervor beyond that commonly displayed by the ordinary man. Paladins are warriors dedicated to a specific deity or group of deities. They defend the faith in word and deed. A paladin epitomizes the ethos of the faith he or she defends and can suffer no detour from that faith or risk loosing the special powers granted by his or her god. The paladin must choose a patron deity and follow that deity’s alignment. Paladins of good dieties have powers designed to foil evil, chaotic paladins to foil law, etc.,.
Many of the heroes of myth and legend described in Legends and Lore could could be characterized as paladins of other than lawful good alignment. For example, Legends and Lore describes Qawaaz, a neutral good hero from American Indian mythology, as being “the ideal for all warriors to emulate.” Axayatl, a neutral evil hero of Aztec mythology, is described as “an avid worshiper of the Aztec patron deity, Huitzilopochtli, ” because of his leadership the Aztec religion reached its highest state. Cu Chulainn, the chaotic good Celt, is characterized as traveling the Celtic lands “to stamp out injustice.” The descriptions in Legends and Lore do not reveal much about the devotion these heroes had to a deity, with the exception of Axayatl, but they do reveal an adherence to high ideals corresponding to the heroes’ alignments, and therefore could be taken as examples of non-lawful good paladins.
The following text describes paladins of the nine different alignments and the special powers and hinderances specific to each type. The powers of the differently aligned paladins are based on the characteristics of the planes (and their dieties) which are most closely associated with the different alignmnets. The first edition Manual of the Planes and material from the Planescape setting is a valuable reference for adding further flesh to the paladin’s motivating ethos. This manual may also provide the DM with useful information that can be used to help design adventures pitting the paladin against diametrically opposing forces. The plane of Nirvana and its dieties would be the venerated by a lawful neutral paladin, lawful goods, the Seven Heavens; neutral goods, Elysium; chaotic goods, Olympus; chaotic neutrals, Limbo; chaotic evils, the Abyss; neutral evils, Hades; lawful evils, the Nine Hells; and neutrals, the Concordant Opposition.

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