Hiring an Anti-Paladin

When they were out looking for henchmen, I rolled on my henchman table, and up came Margaret the Flame.  They'd already met & rejected her, so I rolled instead on a list of classes from Dragon magazine.  The class of the new potential henchman is... Anti-Paladin!  Hahahahahahahaha.  Snidely Whiplash, dastardly fiend and coward extraordinaire, is now working for Mongo.

Mongo's player likes interesting things to happen, so he's hired Snidely despite the incredibly obvious evil tendencies.  You know, the moustache-twirling, the evil laugh, the references to past misdeeds followed by obvious lies and obfuscations...

I expect eventually they'll turn on Snidely, since he's already using the other henchmen as shields to protect himself and refusing to contribute in any meaningful way to the player's plans.  They asked to borrow his dead gnome corpse to see if there were spikes at the bottom of the ball pit, and he flat out refused, because, you know, it's his gnome corpse.  He's bad at sharing.  And he's got plans that involve gnome corpses.  "You can't have this!  I need it!"  First opportune moment, he'll be betraying the players, taking all the loot, and abandoning them in the dungeon.

Now, in a world where the gods are satellites orbiting the earth, and all clerics and paladins are to obey all their edicts, what does it even mean to be an anti-paladin?  They can't serve evil deities - paladins are already required to do that.  The only role left for the anti-paladin is that of being against all the gods.  They've somehow worked out how to steal their cleric-like powers, and are sworn to destroy the gods.  I suppose there's no particular reason they have to be evil, too, but there you go.  Some professions just attract the nutjobs.

Other notable events:

a. They failed to hire the Dingleberry the Surly Clown as a henchman.  That's the way the reaction rolls go sometimes.  He did drop hints about Miami, but when you're in the middle of an underground circus, little stuff like that is drowned out in the sea of gonzo weirdness.

b. The party is now well-schooled in trap detection. Poles are regularly brought out to prod strange things, and if there's no promise of gold, they will usually try to avoid rooms with fiddly bits.  Good old-school rules to live by.

c. The "sleep" spell is proving a lot less useful. It's a spell that scales really well as the players go up in level - as they become more proficient at combat and their survivability increases, sleep becomes correspondingly less powerful, and they are required to improve tactics to survive.

d. The guys came up with a plan to get the golden tongue, and executed it nearly perfectly.  I'm quite happy about that - they are paying attention and thinking ahead about threats in the dungeon.  I want that behavior to continue, so I'll be seeding parts of the dungeon with bits of information about other parts of the dungeon, so they can continue to make informed choices.  Except when the information is deliberately misleading, of course.