The Templars of the Silver Flame
Armed order of the Church of the Silver Flame · Part of the three-order clergy structure · Grand Master: High Cardinal Baerdren ir'Davik
"I am the hand of the Silver Flame. Its purity infuses my soul, its righteous anger flows through my body. Repent, sinner, or I must share it with you." — Brother Micah, the Wolf-Hammer, Argent Fist
Every village in Thrane maintains a militia prepared to defend the community from the unnatural. Archery is a common devotional practice — some say the rainbow-feathered arrows represent the couatl defending the innocent, but they also reflect the practicality of remaining as far away from danger as possible. The longbow is the chosen weapon of the priesthood, and the Church's symbol is commonly found etched on arrowheads. Scholars suggest the arrows represent shafts of firelight piercing the darkness, radiating outward from a central source. But it might be a matter of simple good sense: followers of the Silver Flame believe in honor in battle, but there's no call to be stupid about it.
From these village archers to the argent fists who combine monk and paladin disciplines into devastating holy warriors, the military tradition of the Silver Flame runs deep. In Thrane, "templar" is both a religious vocation and an instrument of state. The Order of Templars is the armed wing of the Church of the Silver Flame: tasked with protecting communities from the threats the faith defines as supernatural evil — undead, fiends, possession, dangerous cult activity, and corrupted relics. In Thrane, where the Church has governed the nation since 914 YK through the Keeper of the Flame and the Council of Cardinals, templar work is never purely policing evil. It is governance, and that means priorities shift with the politics of whoever currently controls the Diet of Cardinals.
The result is not a single uniform force but a family of related organizations operating under the same banner: public-facing knights and garrison forces, an investigative order whose definition of "appropriate means" has shifted across centuries, and the Argentum — a ministry that began acquiring dangerous artifacts and became Thrane's espionage arm when the Last War made that useful.
History
The Order of Templars emerged as the Church's defensive arm as the faith spread and formalized. Its modern posture was shaped by two major events.
The Lycanthropic Purge. The Silver Crusade and the long war against lycanthropy, launched in 832 YK under Keeper Jolan Sol, established the precedent for templars acting at continental scale with religious urgency and broad legal authority. The Purge lasted until 880 YK. Around 800 YK, the lycanthropic curse in western Khorvaire had somehow changed — afflicted lycanthropes gained the ability to spread the curse, a power normally available only to those born with it. It took years for the Diet of Cardinals to recognize the problem. Led by the Pure Flame faction, the Church embarked on the Purge.
Unfortunately, the inquisitors had no good lycanthropes to study; these were rare to begin with, and most had fallen into evil because of the curse. The physical similarities between werebeasts and rakshasas convinced the templars that all lycanthropes were evil. Because curing lycanthropy was so difficult, they assumed it was impossible. To make matters worse, Keeper Jolan Sol had an agenda of his own — he saw an opportunity to strengthen the Silver Flame's influence in Aundair and proclaimed that the curse of lycanthropy corrupted the soul itself. The battle was long and brutal. As the tide slowly turned in favor of the Church, lycanthropes hid among human and shifter communities, and many followers of the Flame were overzealous, harming innocents in their desperate quest to eliminate the remaining shapeshifters. Ultimately House Medani produced a dragonshard focus that could reliably detect lycanthropes, allowing the Church to finally withdraw from the Eldeen Reaches. By 880 YK the Church claimed the curse had been eliminated.
The Purge is contested history. Many historians describe it as a massacre; the truth is more complex than either side's narrative captures. The overzealous templars who harmed shifter communities in pursuit of the remaining lycanthropes are part of the record. The communities that remember being treated as categories rather than people have not forgotten. That era also produced the Pure Flame: a harder sect that grew from crusade-era thinking and remains concentrated in Aundair's major cities and in Thaliost.
The Last War. When Thrane became a theocracy in 914 YK and the Church became the state, Church arms became branches of national policy. The Argentum expanded from artifact acquisition into espionage. Templars who nominally fought for the faith found themselves serving national military objectives when no supernatural threat was immediately present. Leaders still respected the Keeper's authority over spiritual matters, but the war was not about good or evil — templars of all nations still joined together to fight demons, but if no supernatural threat was present, they fought for their own nations. Foreign templars who fought against Thrane argued they continued to respect the spiritual authority of the Keeper, but that the Church should not rule a reunited Galifar. The priests of Stormreach went so far as to condemn the theocracy and Keeper Serrain.
The war left cracks. The intrusion of politics means that some now come to the faith — and to templar service — seeking power rather than purely to do good.
"The church's templars stand ready to protect the innocent from supernatural threats, battling undead, fiends, and aberrations."
Structure
The Order of Templars is one of the Church's three formal clergy orders, alongside the Order of Ministers (who tend congregations and conduct services) and the Order of Friars (missionary priests, also called "priests errant," who wander the world bringing the light of the Flame into dark places). Templars are the warriors of the Church. Most are drawn from warriors and fighters, with a substantial number of monks, a few clerics, and most of the Silver Flame's paladins.
Hierarchy. The Order is represented on the Council of Cardinals. Seven commanders govern the knights under the Grand Master's leadership — one for each of the Five Nations, one for foreign lands, and one for the seas. Their assistants carry the title of marshal, but no formal division of rank exists below commander level. Knights templar are free to wander Khorvaire in pursuit of the order's aims; when moving from one commander's jurisdiction to another, it is a knight's responsibility to report to the new area's commander and await any pressing assignments. The system works better in some places — and between some commanders — than others.
Within the Church's full rank structure, a templar who advances may hold the title of Prefect — the equivalent of Bishop in the Order of Ministers. Few reach Cardinal; most cardinals come from the Order of Ministers. The title "Sir" or "Lady" marks a templar priest.
Allies within the Church. The other two orders — ministers and friars — staunchly support the knights templar. Even when rivalry exists among the leaders of these orders and other officials of the Church, the rank and file support each other regardless of order. A templar can count on fellow clergy to help secure spellcasting services and to offer material aid within reason.
Enemies. Since the order is sworn to exterminate supernatural evil, such creatures are always hostile when they recognize a knight templar. Fiends and undead loathe templars and sometimes go to great lengths to trap and destroy them; fiends take particular pleasure in corrupting the faithful. All types and alignments of lycanthropes have a particular hatred for the Church thanks to the Purge. Shifters are uncomfortable with templars for the same reason. The Order of the Emerald Claw, tied to the Blood of Vol and the worship of undeath, opposes the Church and its agents wherever they operate.
Current Leadership
High Cardinal Baerdren ir'Davik holds the rank of Grand Master of the Templars alongside his seat on the Council of Cardinals. He is widely regarded as an exemplary templar, utterly dedicated to the order's mission — and openly frustrated by the political and bureaucratic demands his Cardinal status places on his time. He would, by most accounts, surrender the Cardinal position if not for his deep distrust of his seneschal, Lady Ofejjaia of Korth. Ofejjaia is a powerful cleric and high-ranking templar based in Vedykar who remained loyal to Karrnath and her mission of protecting the innocent across the Last War despite Thrane's theocratic ambitions. Her wisdom and judgment are not in question. Baerdren fears, however, that she has her own agenda — one that might drive the Order into obsolescence or even banishment if she ever held command. He keeps her close and watches her carefully.
Above the templar hierarchy sits the broader Church leadership. The eleven-year-old Keeper Jaela Daran is the divinely selected head of the Church and technically the state, wielding genuine divine power — she has summoned angels to her side and resurrected Cardinal Halidor after his assassination. Whether she is the true authority or a figurehead for High Cardinal Krozen is a matter of active speculation. Krozen is reclusive, brilliant, and widely suspected of having engineered the death of Keeper Tagor in 992 YK to position the child Keeper where he could manage her.
Knightly and Monastic Sub-Orders
The Silver Flame boasts an enormous number of knightly and monastic orders, each with their own specific devotion or their own assigned region. These are distinct from the ecclesiastical orders. Knightly orders are usually drawn from the Order of Templars, consisting of warriors and fighters with a smattering of paladins, clerics, and monks, based in or near large cities in chapterhouses that double as fortresses. Monastic orders are smaller, located in abbeys near villages, staffed primarily by experts and warriors with a few fighters and monks.
The Order of the Argent Fist — Elite holy warriors who combine monk and paladin disciplines, wielding sacred power against supernatural evil. One of the most famous and widely recognized templar orders. Daily life in the Order is a strict regimen of training and study, with the occasional break for mass. Unless an argent fist is on a quest, life is largely limited to the chapterhouse or monastery — they consider it an honor, an opportunity to ensure maximum effectiveness when called to serve. The most famous argent fists include Brother Micah, an Eldeen half-orc raised in the Church; Sister Ronas Kelur, said to have fought in more battles than any other argent fist alive today; and the changeling Sir Wyrren, who has mastered a fighting style that involves shapechanging in ways few others of his race can manage.
The Holy Brethren of the Silver Blade — A knightly order based in Lathleer, Aundair.
The Knights Custodial — Assigned to protect members of the clergy. Chapterhouses in all major cities of Thrane and many in Aundair and Breland.
The Monastery of Saint Dioscian the Anchorite — A monastic order near Black Pit in Breland.
The Knights Militant — A rigid order emphasizing extreme standards of purity and heroic sacrifice in battle. They stress individual virtue over imposing their ways on others, which has spared them some of the hostility the Pure Flame attracts.
The Order of the Radiant Flame — A contemplative group seeking spiritual union with the Flame in this life. They fight when necessary but are content to study and pray from their monasteries and shrines, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos.
The Penitent Brethren — A subsect consisting largely of shifters who believe themselves innately tainted by the lycanthropic curse. They join the Flame in atonement and seek injury and death in its service as punishment for what they see as their inherited sin. The few non-shifter members consider themselves cursed in some other way — warforged who believe themselves incapable of anything but killing, for instance.
"And like all fires, that devotion scorches any who stand in their way." — Camarind Alst, Provost of Ecclesiastical Studies, University of Wynarn
The Inquisition
One order stands apart from the rest, and its reputation precedes it wherever templars operate. Its members have been known at various times as the Ardent Seekers of the Illuminated World, the Knights Inquisitive, the office of the Hallowed Confessors, and — most simply and most famously — the Inquisition.
They have cycled between knightly order and monastic order across the centuries, and are now a semiformal gathering of Church operatives with no fixed institutional shape. Whatever their form, their purpose remains the same: to root out enemies of good and of the Silver Flame, within the Purified and without, and to cleanse the world of them by all appropriate means.
The definition of "appropriate" shifts by era and by inquisitor. Most would never stoop to acts of evil, but some believe strongly that the ends justify the means. Some have resorted to torture. Some have burned innocents to cleanse a village of a single perceived threat. These cases have tainted the Inquisition's reputation so thoroughly that outsiders often treat all inquisitors as the worst of the order. The inquisitors themselves are aware of this and accept it as the cost of operating without public validation.
Structure. The Inquisition answers to a single Cardinal on the Diet, referred to as the Grand Confessor, whose identity is known only to the Keeper and a small number of elder Cardinals. Even inquisitors rarely see their leader directly; most directives arrive through channels and intermediaries. In the rare personal appearances the Grand Confessor does make, they are masked and cloaked in magical protection. The secrecy is structural: it keeps the Grand Confessor free from outside influence and keeps the Inquisition's chain of command opaque to everyone, including other branches of the Church.
The Argentum
The Argentum is a ministry within the Church of the Silver Flame, originally dedicated to the acquisition, study, and redistribution of magic items and artifacts. Its founding mission was protective: locate dangerous relics before they could destabilize communities or shift power into the wrong hands, secure them, and determine whether they could be safely redistributed or needed to be destroyed.
During the Last War, that mandate expanded. Thrane needed an espionage apparatus, and the Argentum — already operating a continent-wide network of agents with the cover of artifact acquisition — was the natural choice. The ministry was repurposed to serve as Thrane's intelligence agency, and it has retained that dual function since. Argentum agents are comfortable in environments the standard templar hierarchy is not: operating without public validation, running assets under false pretenses, and treating foreign intelligence services as both rivals and occasional necessary counterparts.
The ministry occupies an unusual space: formally a Church ministry, functionally a state intelligence arm, structurally compartmentalized from the Order of Templars proper. In the post-war Shadow War — the Korranberg Chronicle's name for the ongoing clandestine struggle between national intelligence agencies that did not end at Thronehold — the Argentum competes with Breland's King's Dark Lanterns, Aundair's Royal Eyes, House Phiarlan's Serpentine Table, and the Trust of Zilargo. It treats these agencies as rivals. It works with them when the alternative is worse.
The Pure Flame
The Pure Flame is an extremist branch of the Church of the Silver Flame that rose in the aftermath of the Silver Crusade, born from Aundairian communities whose families had suffered through decades of lycanthropic terror. As a faith born in battle, the Pure Flame has a distorted view of the Flame's principles. The core principle of the Silver Flame is to defend the innocent, but those who follow the Pure Flame see it as a tool to punish the wicked. They see no room for compassion; while they accept the idea that the overlords and the Shadow in the Flame drive people to do evil, they focus not on treating them with compassion but on burning the evil out of them. No transgression is too small to require eradication.
The Servants of the Pure Flame — also called Puritans — are true fanatics. They follow every law of the faith to the letter, seek the destruction of every force even remotely opposed to the Flame, and unlike most Purified, have no compunctions about forced conversion. They have substantial influence in the priesthood, extending to the Diet of Cardinals. Most followers are exceptionally loyal to the Keeper of the Flame, but many distrust the cardinals; when the Keeper makes a proclamation that conflicts with their beliefs, they quickly attribute it to corrupt Cardinals putting words in the child's mouth. The Pure Flame has also sent several missionary expeditions to the Ghaash'kala orcs of the Demon Wastes, seeking to wipe out what they consider heretical worship rather than accept it — though none of these expeditions have had any real success.
The Pure Flame is concentrated primarily in Aundair's major cities and in Thaliost — the ancient Aundairian city seized by Thrane during the Last War and ceded under the Treaty of Thronehold. Thaliost has become a haven for Aundairian Pure Flame adherents alongside an Aundairian population that bitterly resents Thrane's occupation. Violence breaks out regularly between these factions. Archbishop Solgar Dariznu, appointed by the Council of Cardinals as Thaliost's governor in an effort to channel Pure Flame loyalty into something manageable, has instead taken brutal action against Aundairian opposition and presides over a city that embodies everything fragile about Thrane's post-war position.
Keeper Jaela Daran is deeply troubled by the Pure Flame and is considering how to address it. The Council of Cardinals has thus far taken no direct action against the sect — the Pure Flame came into its own over the course of the Last War, and the cardinals of Thrane had little ability to enforce their will over the faithful of Aundair. Dariznu's appointment was an effort to ensure that the followers of the Pure Flame would accept the authority of Flamekeep, but it has not worked as intended.
The Shadow in the Flame and the Tarnished
One final threat to the Church comes from within. The Silver Flame itself is not purely silver — it binds the overlord Bel Shalor, the Shadow in the Flame, whose imprisoned spirit occasionally whispers to the faithful. Sometimes it tricks devout followers into believing it is the voice of the Flame itself; sometimes it works with the greed or corruption already in an individual, offering power or immortality in exchange for service. Those who succumb are called the Tarnished.
The greatest of the Tarnished was Melysse Miron, the so-called Anti-Keeper, who challenged Keeper Kyra Danth for control of Flamekeep in 497 YK. Melysse claimed to be Tira Miron's direct descendant and the rightful Keeper, and she was shockingly able to wield the power of the fountain of fire — performing miracles no lesser priest could match. The schism lasted years, until Melysse was revealed to be the chosen hand of the Shadow in the Flame. Because of the fear that her death would allow Bel Shalor to choose a new Anti-Keeper, Melysse was not killed; instead, she was petrified and placed in Dreadhold, where she remains to this day. No agent so powerful has pledged service to the demon since — perhaps because part of its power is still trapped in Melysse. But those who claim to hear its voice and bear its powers continue to cut a swath of darkness through Church ranks.