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| "I've been around 30 years?! Zounds!" Still ready for action, Saladian waits for his next call to action. |
While doing a project to create a character miniature for an upcoming game, it occurred to me that I
have been playing various iterations of said Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
character, off and on, -for the past 30 years. That's kind of a long time. It made me start thinking about all the mileage I have gotten out of the concept. It also struck me, as I don't actually consider him one of my older characters...
The original creation of Saladian
occurred in the early 1980s. He was rolled up by my friend Joe C, who
was running an AD&D campaign using Dave Arneson's Blackmoor setting.
The character fit paladin stats, and as Joe was going to be DM-ing,
he offered Saladian to me to use in the game.
Up to that time, I had
never tried a paladin. The idea of playing a knight, as opposed to
my earlier characters, a thief and barbarian, had some appeal. There
is a great picture in the Player's Handbook of “a Paladin in
Hell”, where the hero is facing off, precariously on a mountain
cliff, battling against a wave of devils. It was very evocative of real
heroism and last stands...Remember the Alamo/Rourkes Drift type of stuff. I have always had a soft spot for
the optimistic, truth and justice for all, types of characters that paladins exemplify:
Superman, Capt. America, Capt. Marvel (aka Shazam), Mr Rogers, and John Wayne.
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| A Paladin in Hell by David C. Suthland III |
In 1st Edition
AD&D, the paladin was a very strong class, and it was tough to
roll up given the rules we used. There were also the alignment,
magical gear, and wealth restrictions to consider. I think a lot of my interest in paladins is the challenge of running them with the
codes of conduct that must be maintained. I had the name chosen for an Aladdin type rogue, but I decided to apply it to the new character. Saladian the Paladin was born!
...I think that sounds cooler if you're 15. And it's the 1980s.
The DM duties switched from Joe C. to Joe H,
and I leveled the character up in the classic Temple of Elemental
Evil, other TSR modules, and his original creations. The Blackmoor part of the game was retconned out of the storyline. Joe H. initially
placed the campaign in Greyhawk, but eventually moved to the
Forgotten Realms. In our vision of the D+D world, both settings were
on the same planet, just different continents. When Joe decided to
use the Forgotten Realms campaign, we just hopped on a ship in
Keoland and landed in Waterdeep.
I played the character off
and on until the early 90s. Fun highlights of the campaign were;
interesting NPC henchmen I picked up along the way (boy, did I have charisma!), asking opponents
to surrender before engaging them, getting a Holy Avenger sword,
fighting in a war, outliving most, if not all, of the original party
members, and finding out that in the quest to receive my paladin
warhorse; it was guarded by a red dragon. Eeep.
Saladian never got that
steed, because that's where things ended. As most campaigns go, it faded
from the world with a whisper rather than a bang. We moved onto
other games and characters, players moved on, and Saladian remained unused in a
character folder.
The Return(s)
of the Paladin!
Fast forward to 2002.
Bioware released a Dungeons and Dragons computer game called
Neverwinter Nights. It had probably been 5 years since I had
anything to do with D+D, but the lure of a customizable game
enthusiastically brought me back. The computer medium allowed
several of my characters to make returns to gaming in the form of
digital avatar!
Other computer games saw
Saladian used as a character. Once one has a graphical reference to
use, the looks of a character start to take shape.
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| Saladian in Lord of the Rings Online |
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| Saladian in Dragon Age II |
Breaking it down, Saladian
is a blond guy with an Abe Lincoln style beard. He fights with sword
and shield. In both LOTRO, and especially Dragon Age II, I was really able to get what I considered his look correct. The Dragon Age II creator really captured the concept I had envisioned.
Around 2007 our group started
playing Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.
It's a skirmish game that uses a similar system to that of the
Warhammer Historical line of rule sets. They are fairly straight
forward and enjoyable set of rules without being over encumbered with
complexity. For a couple of years we had been batting around the
idea of recreating the Battle of Archet, which is the introductory
storyline in Lord of the Rings Online, using miniatures.
The New Frontier: Customizing a Mini
Since we were doing the
battle based on the LOTRO game, we decided that it might be fun to
run it as a mini campaign using the same characters we play ingame.
I actually have 2 Saladian characters in LOTRO, one a Captain and the
other a Champion, so it was he whom I chose to use. Thus I began my quest to make a Saladian
miniature.
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| Games Workshop's Rohan Captain (pack includes mounted figure) |
I have not done much in modding figures. The thought of ruining perfectly good figures, and spending a lot of time doing it, always made me shy away from anything that wasn't a simple mod.
For Saladian in Middle Earth, I picked a
Rohan captain. The mini is nice and it had animated pose. It had a helmet
on, and that could be Saladian, but I wanted to make it a bit more personalized than just painting it out of the pack. The process of sawing the head off was very slow! Pewter is much harder than lead, put I did not want to do a butcher job on it.
The head I was swapping onto the Rohan Captain came from a Perry Miniatures American Civil War plastic boxed set. The replacement head actually had a “chin strap” style beard (aka a Lincoln), so it fit the bill! The Civil War miniature's heads all come bald, (so you can put a forage cap, kepi, or soft cap on it.) After the head swap, I added the
hair was with a couple of layers of Citadel “paint on”
green stuff. It's not a replacement for regular green stuff, but it makes a nice filler and worked well for adding the hair.
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| "The Blackwold brigands are nearly upon us. Summon the rest of the Dale Wardens. We must defend Archet...." |
It was a fun project bringing the character to miniature. It took me outside my hobby comfort zone, and that's a good thing. I always tell people to "learn by doing", and on this occasion -I took my own advice. Something I dreaded starting proved very worthwhile to me.
Believe it or not, there was also some reminiscing too. Saladian, it's taken 30 years, but now you are in miniature form too. Thanks for the memories.
David S.
