No, I’m afraid I haven’t.
BTW, on the Harn mailing list, several movies were cited as being great Harnic material. These included The Warlord, MacBeth (70s version?), and believe it or not, The Blair Witch Project.
Most of the pre-fab stuff is pretty worthless, IMNSHO, but my current DM is running a not-very-cute game in which we were turned into vampires, had to find a cure, two PCs went mad (yes, CofC mad, Screaming mad) and collapsed a city.
So I think the “cuteness” level of AD&D or D&D or any game system has more to do with how the GM runs it.
After all, we had the comedy Call of Cthulhu game going on…
True, but I think this is where Harn differs. Some of the adventure modules are so-so, but some are pretty good. But it’s the world that excels. You would be hard pressed to find a GM that could come up with something so realistic, fascinating, and richly detailed.
IMnsHO.
My first job out of college was as a programmer for this company in rural Michigan. The area was well known as a nest of fundamentallism. (Actually it was also reputed to be KKK headquarters in the North, but I never did figure out if that was UL or not.)
So anyway, seems like you get a few programmers together and a D&D game breaks out (fresh out of college and wearing my geek colors with pride!). Those of us who were so inclined played every lunch hour and some days after work, both times in the lunch room.
Thing was, some of our co-workers were fundamentalist Christians.
At first, this being a work environment, the tension seemed mostly to run below the surface of everyday events. Eventually we noticed glares coming from nearby tables. Then the glaring folks would walk past slowly, the way people might walk past a dead body lying on the sidewalk. Eventually the snide under-the-breath comments started, and then intra-office emails.
We decided to head this off by inviting them to ask questions, and watch us play, and see for themselves. A half-dozen or so took us up.
For the first few weeks, it was like playing in a psych lab, surrounded by people with clipboards (not really) making clicking noises under breath and shaking their heads (really).
The campaign headed into a sequence involving an ambush by some truly evil undead type thingummies (OK, it was a long time ago, and campaigns bleed together). As the action picked up, our auditors turned into an audience. We got ooohs and aaahs when clever players did brilliant things in battle. We got applause when we solved tricky puzzles.
Pretty soon (well OK within a few weeks) we were getting advice shouted at us. And our response was “well, if your so interested, why not join us?” We rolled up some characters for them. They played. Funny, they all wanted to be lawful good. Go figure.
Actually, they played pretty well. The campaign lasted another three months or so. It was great.
At the end of the campaign, though, they all sorta seemed to slink off. Later I found out that the subject had come up in their church communities and they had all been threatened with various modes of social isolation if they insisted on defending us. So they started ignoring us again. But they didn’t go back to harrassing us.
I left the company for greener pastures not long after (not related to the D&D thing). I did run into one of these people years later at a Con. He was there on the sly. His wife thought he was fishing. He was very uncomfortable talking to me.
Makes me wonder how much of the resistance is just parrotting the party line.
tdn; when you have a few free hours (really), check this link:
http://www.theharrow.com/samru/index.htm
Of course, I could be biased, since this person is a friend of mine.
You might also check http://roleplaygames.about.com for other personalized world sites that are pretty thorough.
Not that I disagree with your opinion - it’s hard to find a GM willing to take the kind of time it takes to thoroughly develop a world (IPU knows I’m not such a person). I’m just lucky to get to game with one. 
dogsbody, thanks for those links. Very impressive.
I’m hoping to turn my SO on to the thrills of gaming this weekend, so I’m spending every night designing the campaign. No evil undead here. This will be a love story. Gwelin of Anvrille is about to be married to a local lord, given the sanction of the Sheriff of Sirendel, who is an agent of the king. She will be given, with a sizable dowry, as so much chattel. This is when she’ll meet the lord’s ostler, and fall in love with him. This will be a forbidden love. Hilarity will ensue as they try to sneak around, try not to get executed for adultry, etc. Hopefully hot, hot burnin’ love will turn into LARP. 
Flypsyde wrote:
Somewhere, I saw an unauthorized modification of the anti-D&D Chick Tract, in which the speech bubble in the next-to-last frame (where the pastor is throwing D&D paraphernalia onto a big bonfire pile) shows him saying something like, “Begone, foul D&D books! And let’s throw those satanic ‘rock-and-roll’ records of yours onto the fire, too!”
The really funny part is, when I first read it, I thought it was the real text to that Chick tract! It seemed so appropriate!
Huh. I’m surprised this is still an issue for the fundementalists, I hadn’t heard anything about it since the '80s. Seems like they’ve moved on to declare Pokemon and the card game Magic as the agents of Satan on Earth. They also seem to be the same people who were responsible for the ‘backwards-masking’ stuff years ago too. I think they just pull out a dartboard, label it with various things kids like; music or games or whatever, and whatever the dart hits is their issue of the week… Are there any better explanations?
It’s not a dart board, it’s one of them rubber ducky ponds where the duckies have little phrases taped to the bottom.
Ren: ROFL! Great story.
I played Traveller for a year or so with some very LDS friends. We got along great, and had an absolute blast.
Until my character dumped a prisoner out the airlock.
It was perfectly in character, but they looked at me like I’d just stomped a puppy to death.
Sigh.
This has nothing to do with D&D, but with Christian mindset toward the “occult”. My apologies for drifting off-topic.
Years ago I was friends with a woman who knew how to do tarot card readings. We planned for her to do my tarot card reading someday. Neither of us took it any more seriously than reading the horoscope in the paper.
Then she started attending some kind of Bible study. Some time after that, I jokingly asked her when she was going to do my tarot card reading. She practically gasped aloud and told me she couldn’t because it was “evil,” or words to that effect.
My jaw just dropped, and my opinion of her plummeted. Like Satan has some electronic board down in Hell, and if someone so much as touches a deck of tarot cards a little light goes off on the board so that his little demons can find you…
And let’s not forget the disclaimer that precedes Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video…
Well, I don’t blame them for being upset with you. I mean, Traveller? Come on! Now, if you’d been playing Space Opera, that would’ve been different.
Darned simulpost. That last post of mine was a response to andros’s post.
Since there are so many gamers out there on this thread, here’s a link to some animations about D&D. I think you may recognize some of the characters…
Knights of the Dinner Table has been one of my favorite comics for a couple years now.
Hoody-frikkin-hoo!
I’m a fundamentalist. I don’t see D&D as evil.
It just seems kind of silly to me. Just my personal opinion, however; not based on any theological dictates.
I far prefer my PC RPG and adventure games. And please don’t blame my imagination. As an only child with few playmates, I developed an incredible imagination, and unlike most adults, mine still works.
I could barely read the Chick tract. I’ve only read two in my life, and they’re so damned embarrassing! Yeah, you guys think it’s funny, but unlike me, you don’t get blamed for the tracts.
My mom, however, was vaguely anti-D&D. She had heard some stories to the effect of a few kids killing themselves because of the game. I don’t know if the Chick tract started the rumour, or if it was just playing off it. I thought the story sounded suspect, so we looked into what D&D actually was, and decided that the stories were probably urban legends that spread quickly among concerned parents. It might have had some factual grounding, such as a suicide of a kid who had been involved with D&D, and the story got embellished.
As for tarot and horoscopes, if you were a friend of mine, and heavily involved with either, I’d probably give you lots of printouts from skepdic.com, DavidB’s skeptical group page, and the Skeptical Inquirer. Hey, I’m a skeptic. It’s what I do.
Well, damnit, I came in here looking to really having a debate with some weirdo anti-D&D goons and what do I find? You people reminiscing about old RPGs! Some GD thread thisis! Hmmpphh!
from the above-linked mailbag answer:
Wow, I knew I was big, but 7758 big, wow. I guess you never know your own strengths.
Kiva wrote:
A fundamentalist and a skeptic?
Cool! 
Esprix
In response to the question of whether fundamentalists have moved on to denouncing Pokemon and Magic, it probably depends somewhat on who you talk to. Certainly, I never heard any objection to D&D until the early 90’s(Which probably says more about my age and lack of involvement in D&D than anything else). I was “sucked in” to playing Jyhad my junior year of college(Jyhad is also called Vampire the Masquarade. It is a lot like Magic only different. It may no longer exist, except amount those who were once fond of it. I can’t stand Magic because it doesn’t make any sense to me. Mostly this is because I played about 3 games and kept getting the rules confused with those from Jyhad, which may not be more inherently logical, but at least I mostly understood them, having played many more games). I had Christian friends who were troubled by playing with magic spells or vampires, but the biggest problem I had was the time and money drain that it was. I was threatened with being dragged to a LARP but then the Christian friend who would have dragged me decided that LARPs weren’t good for him, and maybe he shouldn’t introduce me. (This thoroughly confused our atheist buddy, since it was never explained to him. The would-have-been-dragger didn’t find LARPs inherently likely to suck people away from Christ, he just didn’t have the time to dedicate to the LARP, his job, his fiancee, etc. He also felt that the involvement in the LARP was likely to lead to the non-christians there affecting him, rather than him affecting them. (The fiancee was relieved as she had no intention of becoming involved in the LARP).)
Enough babbling about my experiences. My point (in case it got lost) is that I think most reasonable Christians recognize that D&D and its relatives is not a major problem for most people. Many of those reasonable Christians may not chose to get involved in D&D or its relatives, but some will and enjoy them tremendously. I did, but am not involved at this point, since I don’t live by the buddies who enjoyed them. Some otherwise reasonable Christians have a hard time differentiating between D&D causing “undesirable behavior or attitudes” and correlation between the two. (I’ve got at least one friend in that category).