There are now two new dedicate options for the paladin class, in addition to the existing options of shield (hereafter nicknamed defender) and two-hand sword/mace (hereafter nicknamed avenger):

Monks, who are unarmed combat paladins. Drawing upon the divine for mystical abilities and insight, they can perform amazing feats that martial artists or pugilists who rely purely on their skill can't match. I think you'll find that even though they're another hand to hand combatant that they have a very different feel than either hand warriors or assassins. You'll notice that they have more skills than the other 3 dedication choices; in part, this is because they're essentially forsaking more of the paladin skill set to fight in their preferred style than any of the other three dedications.

Champions, who are staff/polearm paladins. They're a somewhat defensively-oriented specialization choice, but unlike a defender (shield) paladin which has most of its defense on 'cruise control' as automatic skills, they're defensive in a somewhat more active way. They also have skills which let them fill a 'field marshal'-ish role.

Existing paladins remain avengers or defenders as they chose; these are options for paladins choosing their dedicate for the first time.

A bit on the history of this project: this is something that Valg and I started dreaming up a couple years ago. We got discussion going around the bare bones concepts that we had, and lots of other immortals helped us fill in ideas. The coding and work for these new dedications was 95% done by Valg a while back and languished 95% done untouched for a long time since he's been on sabbatical for a while. Today Sebeok got on the task of figuring out what was missing and busting the coding out. I threw together some helpfiles and you've got yourself some fun new options. Really we'd like to dedicate (no pun intended) the completed work to Valg since it was mostly his fire that got it done, and especially his insistence on doing a couple things that were huge pains in the ass infrastructure-wise (which he took on) because in the end they produced some gameplay options that were unlike anything we already had.

Please direct commentary and questions to Gameplay. I'll start a thread for it there.