What does Protection from Evil protect us from?

I’ve had this question occur a number of times in my campaigns and it just happened this week for my on-going Dungeon23 campaign. This campaign sticks to the 1974 OD&D rules, no supplements or other bits. If I use a reference, it’s usually going back to Chainmail to get inspiration and a sense of what things might have meant in the LBBs.

Protection from Evil is an odd way to name a spell in a milieu where the focus is on “Law” and “Chaos” – at least in OD&D. It happens with “Anti-Cleric” titles as well: “Evil Priest, Evil High Priest”, etc… but the rules speak about choosing “Law” or “Chaos” at 7th level.  So “Chaos” seems to imply “evil”.

Going back to Chainmail, this substitution of “Chaos” and “Evil” can be seen in the Fantasy Supplement section, under “General Line-Up:”

“It is impossible to draw a distinct line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’…”, and the lists given are for Law/Neutral/Chaos.

So getting back to the question of who/what is affected by “Protection from Evil (Chaos)” – there are two different groups:

• The group that are unable to “keep out attacks” (physically touch) are enchanted monsters. I interpret “enchanted monsters” as those creatures that have been created by a spell or magical effect, or the rules calls out their enchanted nature. In the LBBs, that would be: skeletons/zombies (Animate Dead), elementals that were created by Conjure Elemental, Invisible Stalkers (created by the eponymous spell), an Insect Plague, Snakes created by Sticks to Snakes spell and Balrogs (though they can ignore spells).
• The group is that falls under the effect of “armor from various evil attacks … evil opponents”, so they get a -1 to their hit dice and those protected gain a +1 when in combat with those “evil” opponents. Using the concept that this is really “protection from chaos”, I use the chaos list found in the section on character alignment from Volume 1. For those opponent types that can appear on multiple lists, if they are acting with “evil” intent towards those protected by the spell, then it takes effect.

Of course, AD&D/1e tried to make this all better with the 9 various alignment types, but that’s not a discussion I want to have. Heh. I’m perfectly happy with there being 3 camps… and most adventurers probably fall in the middle!

I’ve used the “Chaos” instead of “Evil” phrasing for this spell for quite a while now, as it just seems to click better in my mind on who is affected.