Judge Not

Over the past couple of days I've been sitting down with my copy of DragonRaid, with the intent of reviewing a game I've been talking about since I started Dungeonskull Mountain. I had every intention of giving the game a fair shake, but I'm afraid I can't.

As I've mentioned before, DragonRaid does have some admirable qualities. It is presented in a very attractive, colorful box with excellent production values. It contains some interesting ideas, like having characters' combat statistics be based on the "Armor of God" passage in Ephesians, or a magic system that uses memorization of Scripture for its core mechanic.

Unfortunately, I simply can't make myself objectively review a game like DragonRaid. This is a game that puts a race that does good deeds "for the sake of helping people, rather than for the glory of the OverLord [Jesus]" in the monster section. A game where creatures on the heroic side are called "Victims". A game where the idea of recreation is portrayed as sinful in the introductory book.

I hope nobody thinks my own atheism is overly coloring my opinion, but this game... this is not my kind of game.

I will leave it at that.

Cover Trouble II

If my fairly open-minded and not particularly religious parents were freaked out by the cover of Freedom, I can't imagine how this one would have gone over with people more uptight than they:

I mean, that's exactly what Jack Chick's audience thinks a book that teaches you how to sacrifice goats to Belphegor of the Sulfur Pits would look like.

Oddly enough, it sorta looks like a 3rd edition D&D book. Hmm...

I Am Your Maze Controller

MONSTER
MONSTER
MONSTER

A GORVIL
A GORVIL
A GORVIL

I need to stat these bad boys up one of these days. I would relish writing up gaming statistics for a monster that first appeared in anti-RPG propaganda.

Then I could write up Glacia, Pardieu the Holy Man, and the rest of the bunch. After that, maybe stats for Elfstar and Black Leaf.

Maybe not.

I'll be out of town for the next week, so don't expect any posts for a while.

Dungeons & Discipleship

There's this game I've been thinking about buying for several months now. It's called DragonRaid.

It's a fantasy RPG first released in the 80s. As you can see, it comes in a big, colorful box and includes lots of pretty little booklets with surprisingly nice-looking artwork. It even has a little map and cutout tokens... and a cassette tape! I mean, come on, this looks right up my alley.

Here's the problem: it's an RPG intended for "firmly establishing Christian values and making Christian responses to new situations almost automatic." Yeah, that's a quote from the official DragonRaid website, operated by its publisher, Adventures For Christ.

I will go on record here: like a lot of gamers, I am an atheist. But I don't have a problem with the existence of an RPG targeted specifically at members of a particular religion. That's actually kind of cool. What creeps me out is the fact that all of the info on the official site makes it sound a bit... well, I don't want to say "brainwashy", but I'm not sure how else to put it. DragonRaid isn't just a game, it "advances from mere intellectual enterprise to behavioral practice." Wow. So, it's not a mental exercise for fun, it's a full-fledged behavioral modification and conditioning program.

The example of play on the site involves the player characters (sorry, LightRaiders) encountering a troll that offers them a chance to leer at scantily clad beach goers or go to a wild concert where they can drink "pleasure potions". It then goes on to describe how the Adventure Master should drop hints on how to encourage the players to "act wisely" in order to avoid "sin enchantment". That actually doesn't sound much like an RPG, where the GM is generally meant to be impartial. To be fair, the words "role-playing game" don't seem to be used much on the site, so at least they're not promising that DragonRaid is something that the game isn't.

(Also, it seems like all the proper names in the setting have goofy in-word capitalization, like OverLord, LightRaider, EdenAgain, etc. After a while, reading that kind of thing would really drive me up the wall.)

Anyway, the game sure does look pretty, but I don't think I can plunk down even the modest $24.00 Adventures For Christ is asking for it in good conscience. The idea of a religious game seems interesting to me, but this one just feels too much like an aid to fundamentalist mental conditioning. I guess if a cheap copy ever surfaces on Ebay, I might give it a shot.