My last blogpost was in November, now five months ago, and I admit the wind has really gone out of my sails in terms of game design, adventure-making, and the like. In September of 2022, I was banned from several Discord channels where I spent most of my free time talking shop about RPGs and enjoying the fellowship of like-minded folks who shared my interests. This was in large part due to private conversations I undertook in good faith with various people whom I've come to trust over several years, who wanted to discuss weightier manners like worldview and personal conviction. To my disappointment, most of those conversations were not, in fact, prompted in good faith and their contents were shared with moderators and persons of interest who summarily rejected my belief system wholesale.
In short, I am a Bible-believing Christian.
I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, nor his kingship, authority, and rule over life. Unsurprisingly, this worldview is neither vogue nor safe for the majority of my cohort in the RPG scene. God's rightful claim over man, his creation, is of no dispute here, but the commensurate worldview which encompasses that foundational reality is anathema to many, if not most, of my peers in this space. There are, in fact, two types of people in the world: those who claim "Thy will be done," and those who claim "My will be done." The first belong to Christ as regenerate sons and daughters of covenant promises which predate space and time, and are made manifest in pure ontology, or the matter of being. The second belong to the prevailing nuances of culture and ideology which reject God and demand personal autonomy above all other paradigms. Saint Paul notably remarks that spiritual rebellion is inherent in the hearts of all men and women, who are without excuse but strive to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.*
I do not hold the transformational convictions I do because I claim any sort of spiritual superiority. In reality, I strictly do not hold myself as spiritually superior because I know it is not true. I am a wretch, a fool, and a beggar. But for the grace of God, I would perish. I am not a man who has floated in the world on difficult surf, somehow reaching out by my own merit to claim eternity for myself from some passive savior offering me a life ring over the next wave. More accurately, I am dead on the bottom of the ocean, availed of no hope in any means save for Christ, who has reached into the depths and resurrected me by his power and will, based on no deserving of my own.** It is for this conviction and truth that I was banned from NSR, Atelie Hwei, and several other locales previously. I do not regret this, but it is plain as fact that Christianity is patently absurd to those who do not claim it by unmerited grace in faith.***
The irony of the many summary claims that I am a bigot, unloving, hating, and filled with vitriol for those outside of my circle is not lost on me. Jesus Christ was slain by those he came to save, and like the thief on the cross next to him on the mount of the skull, it is only because the man on the center cross said I could come in, that I did. I do not care what you think of me. My "suffering" is milquetoast compared to the earnest martyrdom of the prevailing saints who came before me. I am undeserving of love, as are the rest of you. We have summarily abandoned God and his faithful promises through Adam, our representative head, so long ago. But the Lord is not a spiteful tyrant, and even before the dawn of time made a covenant with himself to redeem a lost people to his kingdom. That I can in any confidence be counted in that number is humbling and astounding, yet that is what scripture states is the case.
My desire for this blog has always been to design for me and my tables first, and to preserve for posterity the contents therein for anyone else in the hobby who may benefit from reading what I am up to locally. That is, as I mentioned earlier, flagging. Rather than discourse and civil conversation, I have been rendered a pariah, not worth the time of anyone more enlightened than I in the circles of our hobby space. I challenge you all to consider that we are, by nature, deeply religious people. Our hearts were designed to worship, and worship we will without contest. The question is what object we worship. Is it Christ, our eternal redeemer, who took on flesh and lived in the mire of humanity to absolve us before a perfectly just and holy God, dying on our behalf to atone for death, the rightful wages of sin? Or is it the world, with its calls towards autonomy, self-preservation, grandstanding, and vacuous moral superiority?
Cornelius Van Til, a man of much greater conviction and Dutch extraction than I, speaks clearly of the fervent, if futile, ambition we pursue when we seek after fulfillment and purpose apart from the redemption of Christ. “The unbeliever is like a man of water standing upon a ladder of water in an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of water, against a wall of water, trying to climb out of the water."**** So hopeless and senseless, said Van Til, a picture must be drawn of the natural man's methodology based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate. The man-of-water analogy shows the futility of all thought that is not anchored in God's self-attesting Word. In this and every season, we cannot pull ourselves from this water. As mentioned already, only Jesus Christ can drag us from our depths and breathe new life in our lungs.
I have many ideas I would like to pursue on this blog, from continuing the long-lost expansion of my Android: Netrunner faction write-ups, the point-crawl adventure treatment of Hoarblight Keep from Gavin Norman's amazing Dolmenwood setting, additional oracles and procedures for Galaxy Far Away and general Star Wars content, and more. That said, the reaction of my person to those who otherwise enjoy the content I have created is disheartening--not surprising, mind you, given what I have already cited from Paul's letter to the Roman church. I love this hobby, and I love the people within it, but being silenced for my worldview, rather than engaging in meaningful and earnest conversation about it, is simply frustrating at best. I bear no ounce of ill will against those who decided I was better served in a dustbin than a public forum, and I pray, ardently and daily, for the redemption of their souls, not in vengeance, but in a sincere desire that they should know the same foundational salvation that I, the worst of sinners, enjoy because of Jesus Christ's sacrificial work on my behalf.
If nothing else, this is eight month's of catharsis to put pen to paper and let anyone following know why I have been less than thrilled about interacting with the hobby as such.
Thanks for reading.
* Romans 1:18-22, English Standard Version.
** 1 John 4:13-21, ibid.
*** 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, ibid.
**** Van Til, Cornelius. Christian Apologetics. P & R Publishing, 2003.
