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.

News From The Front

I am happy to report that I finally managed to win a used copy of DragonRaid, the evangelical Christian RPG released during the height of 80s anti-roleplaying hysteria. I anxiously await its arrival. Rest assured that I will be giving it a thorough read, unless I find its content absolutely unreadable - an unlikely prospect.

If nothing else, it looks like the game's artwork is pretty good, and might even be useful to me as inspiration for a quasi-Crusader "order against chaos" campaign idea that is forming in the back of my head, this time sparked by thoughts about B/X D&D alignments, my current reading of the classic Keep On the Borderlands module, the historical narrative A Distant Mirror, the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, and Scott's new setting, the Ordained Dominion of Vologes.

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.