As the book says, Holy Warriors are on a quest to bury evil six feet deep. Like the Cleric, they receive blessings from the gods, but they prefer stabbing to casting. Those Other Games call them “Paladins” or “Champions”.

A Holy Warrior is a bit worse at general combat than a Knight, but they’re potentially much better at fighting specific types of foes like demons and undead.

Basic Stats

The Holy Warrior’s statline is ST 13, DX 13, IQ 12, HT 13. Their Will is increased to 14 and their Basic Speed reduced to 6.

At a glance, that seems like it’d make them excellent generalists, but as the intro says their other traits make them more specialized.

Advantages

All Holy Warriors start with these advantages:

  • One level of Born War Leader: This is a Talent, a leveled advantage that boosts certain skills. In this case, it boosts skills used in tactical planning and leadership, and gives a positive reaction bonus from professional soldiers and fighters.

  • One level of Higher Purpose (Slay Demons or Slay Undead): Pick one of the two when you create your character. Each level of this gives a +1 bonus to basically every roll you make while trying to fulfill the purpose. This does include attack and damage rolls! While you’re not obligated to attack your chosen nemeses on sight, you cannot back down from a fight with them once it does start.

  • Two levels of Holiness: This is an alternate “Power Talent” for Holy Might. It gives bonuses to power rolls but unlike the Cleric’s Power Investiture doesn’t let you cast spells.

  • Rest in Pieces: A 1-point advantage that guarantees that any living foes you slay cannot return as undead.

You have 50 more points to distribute among discretionary advantages and Holy Might abilities. The advantages have the usual stat boosts, including extra levels of Higher Purpose and Holiness, plus stuff that makes you better at fighting in general or that gives you the usual “paladin resistances” to poisons, diseases, and fear.

Disadvantages

Once again you’re required to take a -10 disadvantage representing the oaths you took to gain your Holy Might. Typical holy warrior choices here are Honesty, a Sense of Duty towards all Good entities (like angels and such), and a Vow to own no more than a horse can carry. That last one is a delver-friendly vow of poverty. You can still have a very nice suit of armor and a bag full of powerful weapons, but not own land or ships or other big-ticket symbols of wealth.

The rest of the suggested disadvantages once again take you into one of the “virtuous saint” or “intolerant inquisitor” modes of thinking.

Skills

You start with either skill 18 in a two-handed weapon, or skill 16 in a one-handed weapon and a shield. Suggested holy warrior weapons are polearms, spears, and swords.

For ranged combat, you learn either Crossbow or a thrown weapon skill.

Other mandatory skills include remedial unarmed combat lessons, all the stuff enhanced by Born War Leader, and more in depth knowledge about your chosen nemeses in the form of Hidden Lore, Psychology and Physiology specializing in either demons or undead.

Optional skills cover the usual generic delver set, plus extra monster knowledge skills for the other enemy monster type.

Special Holy Warrior Traits

Higher Purpose, Holiness, and Rest in Pieces are exclusive holy warrior traits. They can also increase their will to a maximum of 25 instead of just 20.

And then it’s Holy Might time again! Holy Warriors cannot cast spells, but they can buy any of the powers and esoteric skills from the Cleric entry, and also have another list of stuff here that might be useful for them. Clerics can also buy these powers if they want. Their respective power talents give bonuses to any required rolls.

  • Detect Good (9 points): Like Detect Evil, but for supernaturally Good artifacts, locations, or beings. Very useful for rescue and retrieval missions.

  • Heroic Feats (9 points/level): By the Honor of Greyskull! You call upon the powers of the gods to grant you a temporary boost in your physical abilities once per game session.

    There’s a version of this power for each physical attribute, and each of those has two levels. Each level gives you +1d to the targeted attribute, and once active the bonuses last for 3d seconds. Holiness does not give bonuses to these rolls.

    Buying 2 levels of all three heroic blessings costs a total of 54 points. A single 1-second Concentrate maneuver lets you activate all your blessings at once, or as many of them as you like if you want to save some for later.

    I think this power is awesome, but the random bonuses and random duration are a drag. I wrote an alternate set of rules for this [a long time ago][1]. The TLDR on that is that I use a fixed +4 per level, and have the blessing last 10 seconds. That lets you pre-calculate all the changed stats from your increased attributes when you “transform”.

  • Resist Evil (1 point/level): Adds its level to rolls to resist the innate supernatural powers of Truly Evil creatures. Holiness doesn’t increase this bonus.

Customization Notes

The point of playing a Holy Warrior is to have wide access to Holy abilities and be very good at smiting supernatural evil, so the book recommends going all in on that. If you just want to fight well in general, pick a Knight or Swashbuckler.

It’s harder for a Holy Warrior to “multiclass” into a Cleric than it is for the Cleric to do the reverse - your GM would have to allow them to turn Holiness into Power Investiture and pay the difference. If all want are the Cleric’s Holy Might powers, though, you don’t need to do anything extra. You already have access to them!

Between both lists, you can assemble the entire set of classic paladin powers, but you won’t have enough points to pick everything up at character creation.

As front-liners, Holy Warriors would definitely benefit from spending those quirk points on extra money for better armor and weapons.

The “This Ain’t D&D” Section

Holy warriors are pretty similar to D&D paladins. As mentioned above, you can even pick from the lists of advantages and Holy Might powers and assemble the same set of abilities D&D paladins get. Immunity to fear, improved “saving throws” against Bad Stuff, faith healing, evil detection…

The one thing missing is Smite Evil as modeled by D&D. Instead of a limited-use big damage attack that works against your sworn enemies, you can get a constant always-on bonus to fight them via Higher Purpose, and make yourself more badass in general for a limited time with Heroic Feats.

The other important thing to notice is that the DFRPG is far less obsessed with “paladin codes” than D&D. The only thing you really need to respect in order to keep access to your powers is a single well-defined -10 point disadvantage. You can have other disadvantages to better model your PC’s personality of course, but they work just like the disadvantages of other profession templates, and are enforced in the same way. The kind of broad and vague code of conduct that many GMs love to exploit to make palaind PCs fall is completely absent here.