Religious orders of knighthood

Religious Military Orders (High and Late Middle Ages)

Typical units: Turcopoles (Medium Cavalry), Heavy Horsemen (Knights).

Behavior: Knights of a religious order receive a +1 on all Morale dice and will never surrender, fighting on normally even if morale results call for it.

Originally conceived as monastic communities, the first military orders included the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and the Knights Hospitaller, founded after the First Crusade (1099). Their members would renounced worldly life to pursue religious devotion. Over time, however, some orders evolved into powerful and, at times, aggressive political and military forces. They were followed by the Order of Saint Lazarus (c. 1100), Knights Templar (1118), the Order of Montesa (1128), the Order of Santiago (1170), and the Teutonic Knights (1190).

These warrior-monks combined monastic vows with armed service to defend Christian pilgrims and conquered territories during the Crusades. Most of the major crusades — the First through the Seventh — took place between the late 11th and late 13th centuries, squarely in the High Middle Ages, with their final phases occurring in the Late Middle Ages.

NOTE: The Law-aligned Clerics of FMC are aesthetically coded as members of the warrior brothers of the 1971 game’s “Religious Orders of Knighthood”, with the added powers to ‘turn undead’ (based on the depiction of Van Helsing in Hammer Productions’ 1958 film Dracula, released in the U.S. as Horror of Dracula) and to cast biblically-inspired magical spells.

The portrayal of Van Helsing-inspired exorcists as Knights Templar may have also had a material basis: this was a miniatures game, and in order to play it, even the authors had to improvise with the miniatures that were then available. While a templar knight would be easy to find in a medieval miniatures set, a Van Helsing lookalike could be more difficult. The same process of adapting, improvising and approximating miniatures would prove to be an endless source of quirks and new monsters in the early days of RPGs.