Cavaliers

In the Cavaliers campaign, the player-characters are all noble knights questing for goodness and glory.

This can be one of the great weaknesses of such a campaign. Who wants to be clean-scrubbed, dedicated to goodness, and holier than thou all the time?

So when running such a campaign, the DM and players must be careful to distinguish the Cavaliers from one another in personality, motivations, dress and style. Yes, they'll all be devoted to good; but they can have different alignments, outlooks, and personalities. One Cavalier can be a heavy-hearted Fated Philosopher; another, though still devoted to doing good, may have been sufficiently embittered by his pre-campaign experiences to be a Dangerous Antagonist; still another may have been cursed and is now a Doomed Champion.

Cavalier Campaigns are usually run to showcase epic struggles between pure good (the player-characters) and pure evil. The fate of the nation or the entire world may be at stake. For example, at some time in the past, the world's greatest king has discovered that a great menace threatens to overwhelm all the world, so he has assembled his bravest new knights to find out what it is and deal with it. In their early adventures, these Cavaliers are gaining experience, rising up from the lowest levels, and assembling clues as to what sort of menace the world faces. As they learn more, and begin to have more and more direct confrontations with the minions of the menace, they realize that the threat is indeed real . . . and that they're not yet adequate to save the day. They must continually quest to become better warriors, to find specific magical items which are supposed to be useful against the menace, and to gather allies and raise armies . . . until the final hour is upon them, and it's time for these much more experienced heroes to face the battle of their lives.

Since all Cavaliers are good-aligned, the campaign attitude is not going to promote rude PC behavior: Theft, robbery, assault, insults, and betrayals are all actions that will get the PCs in trouble with each other (and with the DM).

Table of Contents