In the 1980s I kicked off a roleplaying games club at a university and quickly learned there was a movement to demonize Dungeons & Dragons. Someone passed me the Jack Chick tract and my jaw dropped. It was asinine, and the tract got very popular among gamers themselves and of course didn't have the intended effect. I later learned the hysteria follows a common pattern that affects every new trend. It even affected chess 1,000 years earlier (when Muslims discovered the game in Persia, they thought it was immoral for talk about killing the king, and so miniature chess-sets, sheepishly smuggled around in men's turbans, became a thing for about 100 years). The first religious anti-D&D tracts were by the Rev. John Cotter and another by the Rev. John S. Torrell, who was so crazy he thought supermarkets taint food every which way they can, and special groceries exist only for Conspiracy members which sell healthy, untainted fruits and vegetables. Certainly part of the tinfoil-hat crowd. So what was the final verdict? A colossal red-herring of an issue, and one which even led to child-abuse of D&D-playing teens as I talked around and networked. The Christian activists were mendacious and were using butchered rulebook quotes with ellipsis marks (...) to claim it was players, not characters, encouraged to fight and kill. Secular liars existed as well, like the makers of the 1991 TV movies HONOR THY MOTHER and CRUEL DOUBT (co-starring a young Gwyneth Paltrow) visibly forging artwork on the cover or into the real Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook. Since when does our culture allow LYING about the contents of what was already a million best-selling book? Are we that far gone that we trample on literacy and say to the masses that reality is what TV says it is, never mind examining D&D for yourselves? D&D is blameless, it has no immorality any more than acting in a Gilbert and Sullivan play "The Mikado" will make you a follower of Shintoism. If you want to form a separate Christian group, that may only have merit in setting a "movie rating" for your games, which I can guess is PG with heavy restrictions. There have been one or two explicitly Christian tabletop RPGs made, like DRAGONRAID, but the best you can say about the rules is they are derivative, and even then some other person, with some other form of Christian beliefs, sharply condemned those games too! There's just no pleasing some people. The 80s "controversy" against Dungeons & Dragons was covered by Michael Stackpole here: <a href="http://www.rpgstudies.net/stackpole/pulling_report.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rpgstudies.net/stackpole/pulling_report.html</a>
