Paladin at Three Feet Tall

[iago]

Outside of adapting some of my favorite genres (Amber, Buffy, and other letters further down the alphabet), I've really been enjoying the writing exercise that Paladin proposes in terms of the laws of the order -- it's just the right amount of "restriction" to force out some really great creativity, something which I always valued about my creative writing class assignments in college.

I'd like to see where other people might run with this latest Paladin idea I had, which can really be summed up in the Unbreakable Law:

Never Grow Up

This suggests two distinct directions to go, which I'll get on in another paragraph, and while I haven't worked out what the major and minor laws that would go along with it would be, I think the unbreakable law is really the core idea here (as it often can be) and has proven to be richly suggestive in the few hours I've had to bang it around in my head.

In this set-up, I'd probably call Light Animus "Innocence" and Dark Animus "Worldliness".  This also folds into the character generation process interestingly, where your Light attributes are your child-like attributes and your Dark attributes are your adult-minded ones.  Particular grown-ups and children who are "little adults" are thus the Dark Paladins of any such setting.  Children would have their "sword" skill be something like "Imagination", perhaps, and their "sword" would be a totem of some sort, usually manifest as a favorite blanket, a teddy-bear, a squirt gun, a barbie doll.  Special abilities would be tied into the nature of the selected totem.

There's also a lot of grey interpretiveness about the border between childhood and adulthood, which I think could really be played with to full effect -- and on some level I find the "inevitable path towards adulthood" aspect to be particularly tasty.

Anyway, those two directions:

"Peter Paladin" - Captain Hook as a Dark Paladin.  That's all I think I need to say.  An Order of Lost Boys with the ability to fly; Pixie dust as a physical manifestation or booster of light animus?  So many ways to go!  This is more of a light, fairy tale sort of way to go, and may have more "fantastic" elements in it.

"Little Paladins" - Take what you like about Little Fears.  Discard the rest.  This is the darker, more serious one that probably examines the "awful" inevitability of growing up (there's no Never-Never Land here), but still keeping in heart the possibilities of hope and never truly growing up, becoming an adult who has not lost touch with his inner child, and so on.  This one could be handled much more mundanely, as a predominately social game with few overt powers effects, or it could be all about secret magics that remain invisible to many adult eyes.

Thoughts?  Ideas for minor and major laws, abilities, etcetera?

[Jason L Blair]

As of this moment, I have nothing to add except: ROCK!

[Jonathan Walton]

I have to concur with Jason.  Rock!

I was having thoughts of a similar vein recently, actually, but they weren't as thought-out as yours here.  I was considering making my game concept "Vesperteen" into a weird teenager-based mod of Little Fears with some of Paladin's corruption mechanics thrown in.  If only I could find the time...