The ever-reliable Cambridge Evening News reveals that dark forces are gathering in Cambridge: "Magus Lynius Shadee, self-named King of All Witches, has announced he will open in the city centre by December 24" (I don't know what it means for a magus to "open in the city centre", but I'm not sure I want to stick around to find out). Local church leaders aren't too pleased about this, and warn of bad juju.

This set me thinking about the time the vicar at my former church told us that educated Cambridge Christians hadn't taken the stuff in the Bible about demons seriously enough. Basic theism is all very well at first, but inevitably you move on to the harder stuff. Initially, you're all "everything that begins to exist has a cause" but before long you start thinking that the Resurrection is pretty good evidence for Christian theism (after all, as the Christian sort of God exists, it's likely that he would raise Jesus from the dead, therefore the Resurrection is not terribly unlikely; therefore, given the New Testament evidence, the Resurrection happened; therefore the Christian sort of God exists).

Tragically, for some people even that's not enough. Not satisfied with a Trinity, they crave other supernatural beings. From there, it's a slippery slope to "I had doubts about the validity of that Resurrection argument / fancied that boy/girl/sheep / had a bit of a funny turn late at night: SATAN DUNNIT!"

When I was a lad, the school Christian Union leaders told us Dungeons and Dragons was a doorway to danger, a gateway into Satanism. I'd like to suggest that Christianity is a gateway to Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't a completely new idea: arkannath suggested it in the comments of one of my old posts, which you might also enjoy.

Father David Paul's (Cleric level 1, patron: Papem, god of guilt about sex) warning that "People who go to these things often end up with mental problems" is best read as a caution to people with poor Will Saves. Rev Ian Church is clearly some sort of adventuring cleric (level 3, patron: Jeebus, god of circular arguments) on a quest to put a stop to Shadee (Wizard level 5, necromancer). Our hero has tracked the villian to his underground lair, wherein "there were several ritual and seance rooms and what really struck us was the intense and extreme cold in the rooms". Church (by the way, am I alone in thinking that naming your cleric "Church" is only one step up from calling your characters "Bob's fighter 1", "Bob's figher 2", and so on? Not sure what the DM was thinking with "Shadee", either) neglects to mention how he turned several undead and avoided some tricky pit traps while he was down there, but we can assume he's just being modest. There were plenty of XP given out that day, I can tell you. Still, it looks like Shadee escaped, and now the campaign is coming to the streets of Cambridge. The local peasants are pretty excited by the prospect.

People who post D&D campaign reports to their blogs: death's too good for 'em, I say. I think I'll make an exception for this one of scribb1e's, though.

THE WASTE LAND

'Antea, in stipendia Roberti, dicerem: ἀποθανεῑν δεν θέλω; respondebat dominus ludorum: alea iacta est.'

( The burial of the undead )

scribb1e writes:

The Waste Land seems remarkably easy to do this to. Either because great art is characterised by its ability to sustain more than one interpretation, or because it's a bunch of easily-imitated, pretentious twaddle.

Apart from scribb1e's, the greatest parodies of the poem are Wendy Cope's and ladysisyphus's Harry Potter version.

I recently happened across lumpley's Mormon gunslingers game Dogs in the Vineyard. This description from the author and this review give a flavour of the thing, and some details of the poker-like conflict resolution rules. It looks fun, very different from the mechanics-heavy stuff (D&D and friends) and focused on helping the group create a compelling story by pitching the characters into conflicts with no easy answers. Playing the eponymous dogs, you're in a game world where the religion really is true and your job is to defend it, bringing the towns you visit back onto the straight and narrow, using words, ritual and, when all else fails, a six-shooter.

scribb1e found a bunch of alternate settings for it, all based on the playing characters sworn to defend an ideology the players probably disagree with. My favourite is Fashion Experts on a Reality TV Show, mainly for the fashion version of the game's "Something's wrong", X leads to Y progression.

Following scribb1e's further suggestion that there should be a CICCU version, I've come up with Staff Workers in the UCCF, in which our intrepid players are running characters who are the paid staff sent to help university Christian Unions. In the game, they'd deal with CUs who've strayed from the Doctrinal Basis, so the equivalent to a town in Dogs is a university CU (or possibly a college CU in the Reps in the CICCU variant). The Desert People are the liberal Christians, maybe the SCM (they might also be the other religions evangelising on campus, if there are any). Actually, it might make sense for the Desert People to be Fusion and the SCM represent the corrupt religion of the Territorial Authority, I suppose.

I've not quite worked out what the CU equivalent of shooting someone is, any ideas?

Here's the Something's Wrong progression:

Pride (manifests as self-righteousness)
-leads to->
Sin (manifests as demons outside, e.g. the Student Union refuses to let you book rooms, the student newspaper writes nasty things about you)
-leads to->
False Doctrine (manifests as corrupt religious practices and heresy, e.g. charismatic stuff like speaking in tongues and falling over; rejection of Biblical inerrancy; rejection of penal substitutionary atonement; acceptance of homosexuality)
-leads to->
False Priesthood (manifests as demons inside, like like CU members going out with non-Christians, sleeping with their boy/girlfriends (esp. if they're the same sex, obviously), getting drunk)
-leads to->
Hate (manifests as apostasy (defection to Fusion, the SCM or to atheism), schism)

I probably will pay up for the PDF of the Dogs rules, so I'll have to see how far I can go with this, but it might actually be a fun variant of the game.