Player wants to try to become a hellknight in Age of ashes

[Bandw2]

is there any problem with this? I don't have the books yet as we're starting off with fall of plaguestone, but i know a group of hellknights is at least somewhat antagonistic in book 1, are there any long term problems that a hellknight philosophy would bring? he's going to be LN as well.

[NielsenE]

There's no built-in major issues (at least as far as book three). There could be some RP hooks that could develop in tricky ways depending on what order of hellknight they're looking to join. Of the same cailbre of things as some cleric's anathema or champions code style role-play issues.

[Bandw2]

NielsenE wrote:

There's no built-in major issues (at least as far as book three). There could be some RP hooks that could develop in tricky ways depending on what order of hellknight they're looking to join. Of the same cailbre of things as some cleric's anathema or champions code style role-play issues.

hmm, he's looking into order of the gate, i'm not sure where i can look into the order anathema. where can i look into the order's anathema? i'd be interested in buying the book they're from.

[Phntm888]

There's a lot of Hellknight lore in the PF1 book Path of the Hellknight, which provides a lot of fluff. For something that is PF2 specific, the Lost Omens Character Guide will have a lot of the PF2 information on Hellknights, and there's some preliminary information in the Lost Omens World Guide.

Those latter two producs also have the Hellknight Armiger archetype (LOWG), and the Hellknight and Hellknight Signifier archetypes (LOCG) for PF2, which also might be of interest to your player.

From my personal knowledge of the Order of the Gate, they are one of the orders that tends to be portrayed as more questionable than others, since a part of their philosophy is that criminal activity needs to be thwarted before it occurs, or even considered. They've got a bit of a "thought police" vibe to them, and they tend to focus more on summoning devils and other fiends than other orders. Here's an overview of them on the Pathfinder Wiki.

[NielsenE]

Since it sounds like you're the GM

Spoiler:

The citadel that the PCs start exploring in book 1 is an abandoned Order of the Nail structure, that still has buried remains and treasures of the order. The PCs are also extremely likely to meet an Order of the Nail arminger who's there searching for stuff about his parents who were high ranking members of the order at that time.

The adventure is written generally expecting the PCs to be somewhere between indifferent and friendly towards the hellnight NPC, though it does include combat stats if it comes to that. I feel he was included to make it _easy_ for a PC to decide to take the hellnight dedication for story reasons -- but for order of the Nail by default.

My mention of anathemas was nothing 'official' just a similar role play mechanic -- how would your player's PC feel about looting a historic hellnight structure? About cracking open their graves? Fighting undead hellknight that might ignore the PC, but attack the PCs allies.

If these types of role play conflicts work well with your group, then great. If these are the type of things that cause sessions to explode in player (rather than character anger), then it might be a problem.

[David knott 242]

They are also located in western Cheliax, so odds are that any Hellknights the party are dealing with in Isger are a different order. I would be inclined to say Godclaw, but I seem to recall that they took quite a severe beating from the Glorious Reclamation in Hell's Vengeance.