This is the sixth post in our series on moral codes as class features in Pathfinder. Click here to start with the introductory post.

There is something very slippery about inquisitors, both morally and conceptually. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love the inquisitor as a class. It has a tonne of versatility, a great number of mechanics that are both interesting and very useful, phenomenal fit for just about any party role, and its priestly association means that it can be anywhere on the moral spectrum from the purest of heroes to the most dastardly of foes, with practically any flavour you might have in mind. Anyone who gets bored playing an inquisitor in Pathfinder just isn’t doing it right (probably true of anyone who gets bored playing Pathfinder in general, but you take my point).

And yet, while the inquisitor as a playable class is just plain wonderful, it’s kind of hard to tell exactly what it means to be an inquisitor. This problem just doesn’t occur for paladins or clerics or even warpriests: a paladin is a heroic divine champion of righteousness, a cleric gets her power from worshipping a god and receiving divine favour, a warpriest is a basically a cleric who incorporates a lot of fighting into his worship. Even clerics of opposing gods share a certain conceptual clarity: while a cleric of Sarenrae might be very different from a cleric of Rovagug, we can still point to what it is about them that makes them both clerics and understand that shared conceptual element.

But what is shared between, say, an inquisitor of Iomedae and an inquisitor of Norgorber? It’s not just that they get powers from their god – if that were it, they’d more or less be clerics. There’s something more to them, something they both have, that makes them both inquisitors and not some other class. It’s just hard to pinpoint exactly what that thing might be.

Part of this, I suspect, comes from the rather morally loaded concept of “inquisitor” which we have inherited from our actual, real-life history. For the average non-Pathfinder player, the word “inquisitor” conjures not a female half-orc warrior of Pharasma but a rather sinister, cruel, possibly even sadistic cardinal rooting out heresy by ruthless means, a walking symbol of religious intolerance, corruption, and violence. And certainly, this historical trope forms an important part of the basis for Pathfinder’s inquisitors – the core class features of Judgment and Stern Gaze are enough evidence of that. But this isn’t the whole story – there just isn’t enough variety in the historical image of the inquisitor to support the whole range of different possible inquisitors we see in Pathfinder.

We get a little more guidance on what precisely constitutes a Pathfinder inquisitor from the initial description of the class itself, but this extra clarity comes with new and different questions. We are told that “[a]lthough inquisitors are dedicated to a deity, they are above many of the normal rules and conventions of the church. They answer to their deity and their own sense of justice alone, and are willing to take extreme measures to meet their goals.” If we combine this with the original etymology of “inquisitor” (it comes from the Latin inquirere, which is derived from the classical Latin quaerere, “to seek”) we can start to put together a notion of a seeker, a hunter, a quester of sorts in the name of a deity.

This, I think, helps clarify our initial conceptual confusion about what is a) shared among inquisitors of all gods, and b) unique about inquisitors, in contrast with other priestly classes. That is, inquisitors are those who serve their deity by pursuing specific quests and goals, often (but not exclusively) relating to hunting down enemies of or threats to the faith. They do not serve congregations or dedicate themselves to study and worship (like clerics), nor are they specifically soldiers of the church militant (like warpriests). They are more like special agents for whatever deity they serve, focused on a particular task or set of tasks – no wonder they make such great adventurers! Viewed this way, and doing our best to shed the conceptual restrictions of the historical Catholic inquisitor, we can see that what an inquisitor of Iomedae shares with an inquisitor of Norgorber but does not share with a cleric of Iomedae is a particular approach to how best to serve her deity.

This, however, raises different questions, more directly related to the overall purpose of this series: what kind of moral codes restrict inquisitors, and what kinds of circumstances would cause an inquisitor to lose her status? We are told that “[a]n inquisitor who slips into corruption or changes to a prohibited alignment loses all spells and the judgment ability,” but very little else about the moral restrictions to which inquisitors are subject. Furthermore, this language in itself is rather ambiguous and unhelpful – while the stuff about “prohibited alignment” is fairly clear, as far as anything about alignment can be (an inquisitor’s alignment must be within one step of her deity’s), it’s hard to understand exactly what “corruption” means here. After all, many if not all of the evil gods have inquisitors: Norgorber, for instance, is the god of murder, thievery, poison, blackmail, and secrets, so I’d imagine that “corruption” as commonly understood is not just widespread but actively encouraged by his priesthood, including inquisitors. What would it mean, then, for an inquisitor of Norgorber to “slip into corruption” and thus lose his powers?

To answer this, I think we have to turn to a different conception of corruption, and face some hard truths about the moral code of inquisitors as a result. The key to understanding this is that passage I quoted above about inquisitors having to “answer to their deity and their own sense of justice alone.” Essentially, an inquisitor’s code of conduct is entirely internal, reliant upon her own rather strict, usually results-focused personal view of justice and righteousness. While presumably formed around the precepts of a particular deity, this personal code of conduct doesn’t have much in the way of a relationship with norms or justifications outside the inquisitor’s own commitments. On this view, then, “corruption” refers to a type of internal rot, a move away from one’s own personal commitments, a loss of commitment as it were, rather than to corruption by any kind of outside or social standard.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that inquisitors can just do whatever they feel like all the time. Internal motivations like these can be among the most potent forces in moral psychology, often far more powerful than external factors like legal sanction, social norms, or even religious doctrine. The kind of person who becomes an inquisitor in the first place, who gets this rather impressive kind of blanket sanction from a deity, likely holds herself to a pretty high internal standard. Think less “trust fund kid who gets a free pass on everything due to not having any outside responsibilities,” more “self-flagellating crusader who punishes himself gruesomely for saying fifty rosaries too quickly.”

It almost goes without saying, at this point, that this makes inquisitors extremely dangerous in terms of moral epistemology. When one’s moral code is completely dependent upon one’s own deeply-held commitments and interpretations of justice and corruption, one becomes rather resistant to other ideas, or moderation of any kind. This is the kind of outlook we see in fanatics of every stripe, and it’s easy to see how it breeds extremism. People who think this way about ethics and codes of behaviour easily come to see themselves as the only mortal authority on morality, and any who oppose them (even on reasonable, pluralist grounds) as enemies worthy of contempt at best, destruction at worst. This is exactly the kind of thinking that lets inquisitors justify to themselves even the most “extreme measures to meet their goals,” to quote again from the official description of inquisitors.

So while inquisitors might display many virtues that make them very attractive as adventurers, even inquisitors of the most goodly gods are unlikely to exhibit much in the way of tolerance or patience. Maybe they’re not so different from Torquemada after all…

How, then, are they to be played at the table? While there are as many answers to that as there are Pathfinder players, I think that it’s always going to be some variation of “with great delicacy.” Sure, we can imagine an inquisitor of, say, Shelyn, whose personal code of conduct demands that she be friendly and inviting and pleasant with everyone, but even this approach has a dark edge to it when taken to the extremes to which inquisitors will tend…and hyper-friendly inquisitors, even of the good gods, are likely to be more exception than rule.

Has this been your experience with playing inquisitors at your table? Do you perhaps have a different interpretation of what inquisitors might be like? Do you think that, perhaps, because of these considerations, some of the gods might not really have inquisitors? I’m interested to hear your take on this deeply fascinating, perhaps slightly troubling, divine class!