Atypical Characters: Piradin

Ahoy! Imagine a paladin, the typical gothic white knight of romances. Now throw that image out to let this jerk enter the stage. The character below is a Chaotic Evil paladin meant to act as an oathbreaker. This character is actually a provided one in my Ruination of Bran v2 module I've been working on.

I rolled for this character's stats and got some rather mediocre results. Rather than mitigating those 8 and 9 ability score results, I put the highest result [17] into charisma and added the +2 charisma that high-elves get to charisma. The high charisma makes the character's spells more effective and their ability to do rolls in social interactions far better. With a -1 in dexterity and strength, the previous idea of this paladin focusing on using spells or charisma is reinforced.

The pirate backstory came about on a whim. For Ruination of Bran I wanted each provided character to be its own race, backstory, and class. I found that pirate is a modified form of the sailor background. For an oathbreaker paladin, being a blood thirsty pirate seemed appropriate.

As side trivia Qualen Bata comes from my, yet to be accepted by a publisher, fantasy novel. Qualen is a war god for the elves who is the bastard son of the Goddess of Knowledge and the God of Death. Bata is also what I have the Elves say when cussing, it just means bastard. Digression over, back to the usual.

This character is meant to be played as a intimidating fellow. While they aren't particularly strong in combat, their proclivity toward violence makes the character more intimidating. Now the character isn't stupid, e.g. walking into a tavern and killing everyone. The character simply has no qualms about killing other beings [evil] and prefers to do things on their own terms [chaotic]. The character can work well with a party and follow a quest objective.

Actually working with a party not built up of evil characters might work best for this paladin pirate. After all, if the party had neutral, good, and lawful characters, then the oathbreaker can trust them not to betray him. A party filled with chaotic evil characters probably wouldn't have a lot of trust amongst the members.



*Disclaimer. I came up with this idea on my own, four days later I found Dawnforgedcast's video on making a Pirate Paladin. You're welcome to watch his video as it's interesting as well.