Church Inquisitor Issues

[TempesT]

My DM is planning a new 3.X campaign and he is trying to make the game very RP-heavy and as such has encouraged everyone to create extensive back-stories. So far he has allowed all books except the BoVD and the BoED and we will be starting at 5th level.

I was planning on playing a dwarf Church Inquisitor from Complete Divine.

The issue he has with my choice is that the dwarves have no reason to have Church Inquisitors and has this question, “Why would your character become an Inquisitor?”

So far I have come up with three answers-

1. Dwarves are extremely lawful and would see lies or breaks in contracts as extremely heinous.

2. Dwarves often face off with creatures from the Underdark, such as Mind Flayers and Drow. These races use magic and stealth to defeat enemies, which is easily countered by the Inquisitor’s ability to pierce magical and mundane disguises and his ability to dispel magic.

3. Back-story reasons. Maybe my character had been fooled by some higher ranking elder and thus he dedicated his time so that it would never happen again. (This is all I can say as we have not had our character creation session.)

What I want from the people in the playground is your opinion of whether or not my reasons justify the Prc.

[OracleofSilence]

eh, while the flavor is indeed a little weird, i would say your reasons are kinda underwhelming. lets say that for an inquisitor to be made, they must have
Found some great evil within the church
Uncovered a cult
shown a useful moral grey area
be trained in interrogative techniques (intimidate, diplomacy, detect evil, etc...)

This seems reasonably easy to justify, and is defined by character flavor, rather then some questionable metagaming to get a prestige class.

[hamishspence]

A reason why the dwarves might maintain an inquisitorial organization- there's a Neutral Evil deity of greed and deception in the pantheon.

In Races of Stone, it's Roknar.

In Faiths & Pantheons (Faerun), it's Abbathor.

The activities of this deity and his followers, whatever he's called, might mean it would make sense for the rest of the dwarves to be ever-watchful for corruption.

[balistafreak]

I'm of the mind that mechanics lead to fluff, not the other way around. Everything that follows is an extension of this philosophy.

Don't take the name "Church Inquisitor" at face value. You don't have to dress in red robes and burst onto scenes with a nasal cry of "Noooooooooo one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"... well, you don't have to be part of any inquisition at all.

So, then, what is a Church Inquisitor good at? IIRC, it's resisting and breaking mind-affecting magic: illusions, compulsions, and other such fun stuff. Free Inquisition domain means (as long as you didn't trade it for Knowledge Devotion) +10 to dispel checks, which makes you good at dispelling magic.

As a callback to the really old trope of "dwarves don't like arcane magic", you can say that Church Inquisitor is a natural extension of that philosophy, empowering him to more effectively combat a large area of magic.

This is basically reason 2: mindflayers and drow are full of mind-affecting things. As a hero, you can say that he's trained to excel in combat against these "vile beasts".

Just my two cents.