Not every enemy is another Knight.
A Palatine Knight decides the great wars of the empire. But a company’s daily work is fought against humbler and stranger foes: the lawless, the monstrous, and the magics the empire tried to bury. These are the threats that close the roads, empty the villages, and put coin in a sellsword’s purse.
Bandits
The roads are not safe. Deserters, broken men, and bandit captains with ambitions above their station prey on caravans and isolated steadings, and in the thin imperial order of the frontier there is rarely anyone but a passing company to stop them. Most are a nuisance. A few have grown into something closer to a small army, holding their own strongholds and answering to no lord at all.
Monsters
Creatures large enough to face an armored knight are rare, but they exist. The most storied are the dragons of the eastern mountains: wingless, mountain-bred, and mercifully content to stay in the high passes. Most years. When their numbers swell, or when something drives them down out of the heights, they push into settled land, and the knights ride out to the “rescue.” Other monsters survive in remote country, content to be left alone until something stirs them toward human roads.
Beasts
Below the monsters are the beasts: bears, boars, and the packs that maraud the deep country at the edges of cultivation. A single one is a hunt; a pack driven by hunger or hard weather is a battle, and the largest dire specimens that lead them can break a poorly handled company outright. They are not malicious. They are simply large, hungry, and in the way.
The Shadows
The wizards once banished the old gods from the world, but the line that now divides them was drawn later, and by other hands. When the Palatine Knights were forged, it was the empire and its Knights, not the wizards, that split wizardry into the useful and the cast-out. Everything the Knights had no use for became Shadow Magic, its practitioners the Shadows: a name that runs from the merely mistrusted to the strictly forbidden. Nature magic, oldest of them, opposed the making of the Knights and has been distrusted ever since, though it was never banned. Illusion and necromancy were: outlawed as heresy, and worked now only in secret.
They have not forgotten. Some seek only to practice in peace; others wage a quiet war over relics the empire would rather stayed buried, for the old powers were banished, not destroyed, and there are those on every side who would see them stir again.
The Cults
The deadliest enemy on the frontier carries no sword. The old gods were banished from the world an age ago, and the empire has been the better for it, but not everyone agrees. In hidden shrines and forgotten places, cults gather around a single conviction: that the gods should walk again. And they will pay anything (towns, lives, their own souls) to drag one back into the world.
They are not bandits after coin or beasts after a meal. They are true believers, which makes them worse. A cult will bleed a captured village dry in its rites, raise the dead to swell its ranks, and welcome the ruin it brings as proof its god draws near. Where a cult takes root, harvests fail, the dead will not rest, and something vast and patient begins to stir beneath the chanting.
The wizards banished the gods for a reason, and the knights have not forgotten it. To root out a cult is not a contract to be haggled over. It is a duty. A company that uncovers one is bound to break it, hunt down its priests, and seal whatever it has been trying to wake, before a local madness becomes a catastrophe that no army of stone can undo.
For the gods were banished, not destroyed, and there will always be those who would open that door again, heedless of what waits on the other side.
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Field notes on the threats of the Palatinate:
- Monsters » dragons and the great beasts of legend
- Beasts » the bears, boars, and dire packs of the wild country
- Bandits » the captains, gangs, and broken men of the roads
- Shadow Wizards » the cast-out wizardry, mistrusted and forbidden
- Cults » the fanatics who would return the banished gods, and the duty to stop them