Law enforcement within Cheliax


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion

Grand Lodge

Are the Hellknights and Inquisitors the only law enforcement to be found within Cheliax? Or does Cheliax also have reeves: high reeve, town reeve, port reeve, shire reeve aka sherriff, reeve of the hundred, manor reeve? Or does the Cheliax military also perform police duties among the civilian population? Similar to the Gendarmie in France or Carabinieri in Italy or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police?

Conceptually, are the Hellknights similar to the Street Judges in the 2000 AD/Judge Dredd comics in that they combine the roles of police officer, judge, jury, and executioner based on the Measure? Or are courts held within Hellknight Citadels that resemble trials? Does the accused plea? Or is guilt presumed and the Hellknights go straight to punishment the punishment phase?

Liberty's Edge

The Hellknights are technically independent of any government oversight; they're somewhere in between vigilantes and independent military contractors. That being said, the Hellknight orders are, above all else, extremely lawful in outlook. I'm sure that the ones that go around capturing criminals and the like observe some kind of due process, but I suspect that they examine the evidence *before* they go after somebody, so once you're caught I'd guess that you'd be "processed" fairly quickly.

As for Cheliax, they absolutely have regular law enforcement; as I recall, it's mostly down to various city guard organizations to carry out arrests, though army units probably spend a lot of time rooting out bandits and other criminals outside the cities. One notable feature of the system is that bribery has basically been institutionalized; for most crimes it's acceptable for the arresting officer to accept an appropriate 'fine' in lieu of other punishment, presumably assuming that their superiors get the appropriate kickbacks.

As far as I can tell, the courts in most parts of the country are more or less run by the church of Asmodeus, so trials likely swift and more than a little cruel. Executions are a popular form of public entertainment.


In Cheliax, the due process is most likely "find the guilty person then make the evidence fit" if the "guilty" person is not connected or is cut loose from their protectors. Is this for CoT?


In Council of Thieves, Westcrown has its own guard/police called the Dotari. There's your precedent. Cheliax has standard enforcement. As for what to name them, it's left to the GM. So I suspect in your campaign everything will be a reeve, 'cuz clearly that's your thing.


TritonOne wrote:

A

Conceptually, are the Hellknights similar to the Street Judges in the 2000 AD/Judge Dredd comics in that they combine the roles of police officer, judge, jury, and executioner based on the Measure?

I definitely play non-corrupt Hellknights as Judge Dredd types. Whether they have the power to judge/imprison/execute will depend on local circumstances. Whether they hold an Inquisition or Trial will likely depend on the particular Order. One Order might use Trial by Fire where another uses interrogation & torture to establish guilt. Even Trial by Combat might be possible, though I would probably restrict that to trial of fellow Hellknights.

Grand Lodge

S'mon wrote:
One Order might use Trial by Fire where another uses interrogation & torture to establish guilt.

That brings up a question about alignment in the Pathfinder/Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system. Can a Lawful Good Hellknight engage in torture or enforce a law that he or she considers unjust? Could the Hellknight still have an alignment of Lawful Good? Or would he/she be restricted to Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil using the alignment system?

Anguish wrote:
In Council of Thieves, Westcrown has its own guard/police called the Dotari. There's your precedent. Cheliax has standard enforcement. As for what to name them, it's left to the GM. So I suspect in your campaign everything will be a reeve, 'cuz clearly that's your thing.

Thanks, I will look into the Dotari.

Liberty's Edge

TritonOne wrote:
That brings up a question about alignment in the Pathfinder/Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system. Can a Lawful Good Hellknight engage in torture or enforce a law that he or she considers unjust? Could the Hellknight still have an alignment of Lawful Good? Or would he/she be restricted to Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil using the alignment system?

Such a Hellknight would indeed rapidly become LN or LE if they used torture with any regularity. Then again, LG is the least common Lawful alignment for Hellknights...

But personally, given their focus on pure law, I'd be inclined to say that Hellknights very rarely use torture given its' unreliability as an information gathering tool. Unlike, say, the Church of Asmodeus, who just want a confession whether the person is actually guilty or not (which makes torture an excellent tactic), Hellknights actually want to make sure they have the right person. Most of them probably care little about what a wrongful conviction does to the one convicted, but it also results in a criminal getting away with their crime, and that's unacceptable. I'd expect non-torture interrogation ala modern police, thorough trials, and the extensive use of truth-detecting magic in order to make very sure they have the right man.

I mean, seriously, Hellknights have Clerics and Wizards among them. More than enough that they can use magic in their trials to make absolutely certain of the accused's guilt. They probably ask about other crimes the accused might have committed while they're at it (which screw most criminals of any sort, even those innocent of the particular crime they're accused of)...but they'd make very sure a criminal wasn't getting away while they convicted the wrong guy.


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TritonOne wrote:
S'mon wrote:
One Order might use Trial by Fire where another uses interrogation & torture to establish guilt.

That brings up a question about alignment in the Pathfinder/Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system. Can a Lawful Good Hellknight engage in torture or enforce a law that he or she considers unjust? Could the Hellknight still have an alignment of Lawful Good? Or would he/she be restricted to Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil using the alignment system?

You should read up on medieval justice systems. Torture wasn't necessarily the default mode. A lot of the times a trial would involve some kind of magistrate or headman or other mediator calling for witnesses to whatever crime was committed. In a lot of societies punishment would involve a payment in cash or kind to the party that had been wronged. In other cases there would be a fine and the guilty party would be put in stocks or otherwise humiliated, but generally left unharmed. Prisons and jails weren't really common - Who can afford to lock up peasants and commoners? Capital punishment was generally reserved to murder, rape, treason, arson, and other very serious crimes. If torture was used the crime at hand was usually something like treasont or blasphemy, and as often as not it was politically motivated.

Hellknights don't necessarily have to be scary because they torture people. Assuming they're as lawful as they're supposed to be they could even be respected, albeit respected from a distance, by commoners.

http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=60 72&context=jclc

http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=66 68&context=jclc

I'd imagine Hellknights are almost exclusively concerned with major, serious crimes - Treason, Heresy, Murder, Arson, Rape, Kidnapping, Dissent, Sedition, Tax Evasion, and maybe magical crimes like summoning dangerous critters. They wouldn't necessarily have the man power or the interest to be chasing after every petty street criminal or brawler or sheep rustler - Town magistrates and guards could handle that in towns and peasants can handle minor crimes among themselves or with the assistance of a district magistrate.

Grand Lodge

Thanks, FrankManic.


TritonOne wrote:
S'mon wrote:
One Order might use Trial by Fire where another uses interrogation & torture to establish guilt.
That brings up a question about alignment in the Pathfinder/Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 system. Can a Lawful Good Hellknight engage in torture or enforce a law that he or she considers unjust? Could the Hellknight still have an alignment of Lawful Good? Or would he/she be restricted to Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil using the alignment system?

Answers are 'IMC'.

They would need to balance Law and Good, taking into account that they may be more Lawful than Good - LG with N tendencies seems likely for many Hellknights, whereas LG with NG tendencies would be rare in most orders.

Torture - I would expect a strict code for permissible 'enhanced interrogation techniques'; when and where they could be applied, eg a standard of minimum threshold evidence (prima facie evidence) before torture could be used, and probably strict rules against permament maiming/mutilation of the unconvicted. A complete ban on torture sounds more NG, while ad hoc torture ignoring the rules in a 'ticking time bomb' case might be done by a CG character, but a LG(N) Hellknight would want an established procedure.

Unjust law - if an LG Hellknight considers a law unjust they will need to consider if breaking the Law to increase Good is better than keeping the Law to maintain Order. For a typical Hellknight it would need to be a really extreme case where they would answer 'break the law', and Cheliax society seems to be structured (by Asmodeus?) in such a way that such extreme cases rarely if ever come up. Eg a LG(N) Hellknight might refuse to execute a child for the crimes of their parents, but luckily that never happens. However children *do* get Indentured along with their parents to pay off family debts - tough luck, but c'est la vie - and indentured servants still have legal protections, many have perfectly decent lives, right?

From the sources, I think that Cheliax society is structured so that it's always easy to go along to get along, so a LG character is never presented with a stark choice where openly fighting the system is clearly the right thing to do. Instead the system encourages constant moral compromise. For the LG Hellknight, they are never presented with a 'fight now or be Evil!' type choice; rather there are a thousand petty compromises that will tend to slide all but the strongest willed from LG through LG(N) to LN(G) to LN. Most will stop there; some will go on to LN(E) and ultimately LE.

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