Call of Duty: A Paladin Sourcebook
By James Garr
Chainmail Bikini Games
Review by Greg Kessler
I never played a Paladin in my life, and since I have been role playing since 1982 that is saying something. I even managed to escape playing an anti-paladin when that was the big thing (for those of you who don’t remember this, scrounge up an old best of dragon from the mid-eighties). I never had the moxy to do it right, just too evil and not enough patience for the long haul. My late friend Jay (who was considerably more evil than I in real life) played them all the time and seemed to derive some joy from it.
Used properly Call of Duty can help you create a fanatical soldier who could stand up to anyone on the battlefield. With little foreplay the book jumps right in with some new feats. Among these (of which all are extremely well thought out and described) two stand out as particularly impressive. Knowing Gaze gives a paladin the ability to basically detect evil anywhere. As a result of his training (and I imagine a dash of insanity) a paladin with this ability can scan an area and immediately see if there is evil afoot. Martyr is the other feat that stands out. It is not often that a character is given a special benefit to dying in a campaign, in fact dying is the last thing that anyone want to do in a dungeon crawl. If you use Martyr, when a foe brings your character to -1 hp, you immediately get an attack of opportunity before you begin to perish. WOW, you are such a fanatical being that the very thought of dying in combat imbues you with the ability to strike from the dead. I like that. In addition to the new feats you get a whole host of new prestige classes (although the book advises that you do not mix the typical paladin from the WotC books and one of the Call of Duty paladins, mainly for continuity sake.
Sold as a 67 page PDF, Call of Duty is a $7.00 gem from RPGNOW.com. Call of Duty is only the second product from Chainmail Bikini Games (the other being a Monk sourcebook) and I think we can expect great things from them in the future.