Mike Hinshaw
Villager
I get the sense - and hopefully I'm right - that many of you have never experienced up close and personal loss and don't understand the significance of a grave. It's bad enough dealing with the fact that the once cherished, warm and familiar body of your loved one has been subjected to the violation and indignity of an autopsy. So no, treating her like an attack marionette but putting her back after is not ok.
I get it - from 500 feet up it is trivial to animate the corpses of the dead and use them in battle - they are nameless and have no lives or family to care for them - they may even have been your faceless enemies a minute ago. 500 feet up the grave markers and crypts aren't made out of stone out the desire of the bereaved to have a permanent connection to the lost. 500 feet up there are no women and children amongst the orcs and the goblins. 500' up the paladin doesn't have to reconcile his divine conviction with the blatant violation of it happening on round 4. But most of the time I don't want to roleplay at 500' up because then I just get to feeling like I'm playing an overly complex game of Talisman. But that's me - your DM, your table is free to do as it wishes but I'm telling you you're missing out on some of the best the game has to offer. It's ok to be a little uncomfortable sometimes next to your d20.
So if your table is playing beer and pretzels DnD I say bring on the Paladin and have a laugh. If not, don't mix them up with some oddball team-up story because it will lead to irreconcilable conflicts at worst and consume all of the RP oxygen and leave everyone else as a sidekick at best.
Look at existing real-world cultures, and you find that there are many who see the grave the way that you seem to talk about is a sacrilege, depending on the beliefs about death. You are talking about some of this society's beliefs - and even those are not universal in this country. Many Native American tribes would still prefer "sky burials" for instance (the funeral industry has managed to force that out because they do not make money on it). Some societies revere death, to the point of keeping the corpse with the family, having them come to meals and events, etc. As a DM, the job is to think of these things. Also in many cultures, it was not looked on as evil to raise the dead under many circumstances, for instance, until the coming of Christianity, it was OK to raise the dead long enough to get information from them (in the poem Voluspa, the god Odin raises the Volva to answer his questions, and the poem is their conversation). So, why should Christian morality be applied to all D&D cultures?
And as for the paladin - in 5th edition, there are no alignment restrictions on paladins - any religion can have some sort of holy warrior if you take the time to write one up, which there are guidelines in the rules for. So, what alignment, religion, and culture is the paladin from (some cultures are more tolerant than others). The original rules based the paladin on Sir Lancelot, the cleric from the Church Knights, the ranger from Aragorn (LoTR), thieves from the Grey Mouser (Fritz Lieber), so on. Times and attitudes have changed as people with different backgrounds have written parts of the game. That is a good thing - it allows better role-playing.
Mike Hinshaw