The Order of the Calling: Crusaders in the Modern Age
The Order of the Calling has the most complicated institutional history in the Empyrea cosmology, and that is saying something given the competition. Founded in 1299 as a standard-issue medieval religious military order (protect pilgrims, defend territory, expel the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula) it underwent a 19th-century reform that completely reoriented its purpose. Its members today regard the Calling as something close to a deity, believe it protects humanity from the corruption coming from the Dark Beyond, and operate through a chain of succession in which each knight's power is conducted through a single passed-down amulet.
The Crusade-to-cosmic-guardian pipeline is, to put it mildly, not a standard institutional trajectory. Understanding how it happened requires understanding what the Order decided the Calling actually is.
The Original Organization
The Order was established in 13th-century Spain (formally: Orden de la Convocatoria) with the standard crusader-order mandate of the period. For several centuries, it functioned in the expected mode: military religious organization, specific territorial objectives, gradually diminishing relevance as the Reconquista concluded and the political conditions that had sustained crusader orders began to change.
It was suppressed, as many such orders were, and then restored in 1952: a gap of centuries during which the Order apparently continued to exist in some form, operating under the kind of semi-clandestine continuity that religious organizations with a sense of special mission tend to maintain even when officially dissolved. The restoration in 1952 brought with it the reformed doctrine that now defines the organization.
