[Intellectual challenge] Justify a paladin being a member of a thieves' guild

[Mouseferatu]

Just as the title says. Given the plethora of paladin threads, I want to see how (and if) people can justify a paladin being a member--not just briefly allied, but a member, in good standing--of a thieves' guild. (The paladin need not actually be a thief--that is, he needn't steal things himself. He could be a guard, an enforcer, or what have you.)

You can posit any details you'd like about the guild itself, about the society, and about the paladin's Church/deity. But you must stick with the RAW when it comes to actual mechanics and alignment.

Have at.

 

[Nifft]

Lord Vetinari's version of the Thieves Guild could easily employ a Paladin.

1/ Obedient to legitimate authority;
2/ Enforcing the laws (no robbing people with permits, punishment of unlawful thievery, etc.);
3/ Partaking in stochastic taxation rather than the usual "easy-to-avoid" kind of taxation.

Cheers, -- N

 

[jdrakeh]

Did Lord Robin's Merry Men qualify as a guild? In the face of tyranny, what is good may not necessary be in accordance with the law of the land but rather, a higher law of the sort handed down by God, not man. When the Church serves the interests of wealthy men rather than the Lord, with whom does the true paladin's allegiance lie?

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Does he have to eat with tax collectors, too?

 

[Mouseferatu]

Did Lord Robin's Merry Men qualify as a guild? In the face of tyranny, what is good may not necessary be in accordance with the law of the land but rather, a higher law of the sort handed down by God, not man.

I was contemplating the Merry Men myself when I posed the question. I don't think a paladin could justify joining the MM as written. Prince John and the Sheriff, while bastards, were the legitimate authority at the time, and a paladin is supposed to work within the system to change the behavior of legitimate authorities (or at least to try that first, before taking to more extreme measures).

If, however, you had a similar situation in a conquered/occupied nation, where the leadership wasn't legit, and if the guild focused on robbing members/supporters of the regime to support a resistance, I think the paladin could easily justify being a part of that.

 

[Celebrim]

Interesting:

The first example is drawn from my homebrew:

1) The Paladin is a member of a nation which is ruled by acredited craftsman. Guild officials not only govern their trade, but the trades collectively govern the nation. Particular trades hold permenent roles in government. For instance, the Minter's Guild is equivalent to the office of the Treasury. The Mercenaries guild is the army. The Shipwright's guild controls the navy, and so forth. In this society, the Thieves guild is an official institution of the government and provides an important service - namely, in its official capacity, it is the office of foreign service and intelligence, or 'spies' and 'counter-spies'. It just so happens that on the side, the guild still continues to regulate and ply its more ordinary trades - smuggling, racketeering, theft, and so forth. This situation is tolerated by the other guilds in exchange for promises to keep its illicit activities suppressed above a certain level. In such a situation, the Paladin could work both as an agent of the government, and as a guild enforcer responcible for tracking down 'rogue agents', and be reasonably detached from the skullduggery that portions of the guild engages in.

2) The Paladin as a result of a pledge of honor is honor bound to protect the life of a high ranking thief who has saved his life and/or rendered some other service which the Paladin's code compels him to repay. Provided that the particular thief in question is only a rascal and not a particularly sadistic SOB, the Paladin could for quite some time continue this relationship of indeptedness. An example which appears to be something like this in fiction is Han Solo and Chewbacca. Han is clearly a rogue, but not a particularly nasty one.

3) The society is so corrupt, that an honorable Paladin can only continue to live in honor, by breaking the laws of the society. For example, the Paladin could be a member of a guild roughly corresponding in character to the legend of Robin Hood's Merry Men.

I think these can be made particularly strong by using two or three in combination.

 

[jdrakeh]

Prince John and the Sheriff, while bastards, were the legitimate authority at the time. . .

I'm not sure that murdering your opponents and usurping your brother's throne in absence of his body to ensure your authority constitutes legitimacy in any but the eyes of self-serving men. I edited above to add some clarity -- when then Church forgoes the will of god to enrich men who have forsaken him, there is clearly evil afoot. Whom does the paladin serve? The corrupted Church and its masters or a higher authority?

I would argue that, in the case of Nottinghamshire, those in power were clearly abusing the power invested in them by God and King, supressing the peasantry and usurping the holdings of absent feudal Lords for personal gain. Was this the will of God? They may have claimed as much, though I think that any literate scholar or nobleman (such as Sir Robin) with access to a Bible could easily refute such claims.

The question is, does the paladin serve men or God? The corruption of God's kingdom at the hands of tyrants is the true test of such a soul. Were I the God whom the Paladin had sworn to serve and my Church had forsaken my will, I would demand that my servant rise up fight against such corruption, not partake in it. And if he did partake, he certainly wouldn't be getting any kind of magical backing from me (although, I suppose he may find a new God who was more open to murder, usury, and theft).

 

[Mouseferatu]

I'm not sure that murdering your opponents and usurping your brother's throne in absence of his body to ensure your authority constitutes legitimacy in any but the eyes of self-serving men.

It's questionable, sure. But the Sheriff was legally appointed, and Prince John was next in line in the absence of King Richard.

My point certainly wasn't that a paladin shouldn't oppose them, merely that I'm not sure joining a group like the Merry Men is the way he should go about it. (Again, at least initially.) It's a gray area, certainly, and I'm not suggesting that a paladin couldn't side with Robin under the proper circumstances. But I think he might wind up as the aforementioned occasional ally, as opposed to a true member.

Or I could be wrong. As I said, I was contemplating the Merry Men as one possibility when I first posed this question, and I'm still not entirely sold by either side of the argument.

 

[Rabelais]

Can we all simply agree that a Paladin's code has NOTHING to do with the laws of metahumanity, and EVERYTHING to do with the laws of the gods?

off the top of my head...

Once upon a time, there was a land beset by tyranny. The nefarious usurper prince Ioan and the kleptocratic nobles of Yboria have stripped the lands clean of their wealth, and the lives of it's downtrodden poor.

Galen Atlanta, Chosen of Athena opposes The Usurper. At the head of an army of rogues, Galen cares not a whit about what happens to the wealth that is "liberated" by his cohorts, only that justice is meted out to the kleptocrats that have destroyed that which he held dear. His rogues adore Galen, he has a flair for the dramatic, and a keen sense of duty to his comrades. Galen has struck deep into the heart of tyranny time and time again.


It's a blatant rip off of Robin Hood. Imagine Robin Hood in Everbright Plate Armor.

 

[jdrakeh]

Or I could be wrong. As I said, I was contemplating the Merry Men as one possibility when I first posed this question, and I'm still not entirely sold by either side of the argument.

Is the paladin's vow of service to God less rigorous than that of his priests? Consider Friar Tuck a man (admittedly a drunken man) who came to believe that the Merry Men embodied more qualities of his God than the Church did at that time. Tuck chose to ally with those who practiced the will of God, rather than simply used it as a justification to commit crimes against their fellow men. Would a paladin be any less pious if he came to the same conclusion?