I think you're underestimating the importance of morals professed by a game.WhiteShark wrote: ↑ May 26th, 2023, 09:00Well, yes, being vaguely Christian-inspired is certainly more Christian than being openly satanic.rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ May 26th, 2023, 08:48WoD is a counterexample to D&D, it's a setting with actual Biblical scripture usage as created by atheists. Again, I'm siding with Gygax on this one. D&D has far more Christian-like qualities than WoD does.
Consider this excerpt from an early Dragon magazine article:
I won't pretend to speak for Gygax, but personally I strongly disagree with the second part. Gygax clearly defining Good and Evil was not some accident, it is how he wished to create his work and would have had it no other way.And good and evil are really Christian concepts that belong within a Christian mythology […]
We can see this in his other works e.g., one of the primary duties laid out for the player character in Dangerous Journeys is to vanquish evil.
To quote from Tolkien's essay On Fairy Stories (worth reading if you haven't),
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.
If man is made in the image of God, then it is natural that man would likewise have a natural urge to create, the term Tolkien used was "sub-creator".Dear Sir,” I said—Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made
Again, this time with the full part of the letter:WhiteShark wrote: ↑ May 25th, 2023, 09:56But Tolkien's works do have the very things I'm talking about. His setting is theistic, complete with a God, a devil, an afterlife, and so on. He depicts the praiseworthiness of virtue and the beauty of martyrdom. He doesn't include "cults and practices", certainly, but in every other way his setting is deeply theistic. That's why it's up there in the OP as the fifth possible implementation. This is what I would call 'infusing your worldview at every level'. The difference between Tolkien and the satanists is that his worldview is true and good and beautiful and, for the most part, he shows you rather than tells you.
Tolkien realized the work he created was Catholic because he is Catholic. It was impossible for Tolkien to create something that wasn't Catholic unless perhaps he purposely set out to do so.The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revisions. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. However that is very clumsily put, and sounds more self-important than I feel. For as a matter of fact, I have consciously planned very little and should chiefly be grateful for having been brought up (since I was eight) in a Faith that has nourished me and taught me all the little that I know
If you are Christian then that will shine through any work you create, likewise how the values and beliefs of the people creating current D&D creates a noxious odor around it.