Subtitle

The Not Quite Adventures of a Professional Archaeologist and Aspiring Curmudgeon

Monday, November 3, 2008

The Devil's Money?

I'm back from the forest, and when I returned, I saw this very strange news story.

GenCon, a yearly role-playing game convention, holds charity auctions and donates the money to groups that they feel are worthy of support. In honor of Gary Gygax, who was a co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and hence one of the fathers of the role-playing game hobby, GenCon decided to donate auction-generated moneys to Gygax's favorite charity, the Chrisitian Children's Fund.

Nothing so odd about that.

The strange part is that the Christian Children's Fund refused the money, allegedly upon learning that it was raised in part through the sale of Dungeons and Dragons parphenalia.

Unfortunately, the only information I can find on this comes from the gaming community, with no comments from the Christian Children's Fund itself, so it's difficult to say why they turned it down. The general feeling amongst the gamers is that it's due to the fact that some religious groups hold some mighty odd objections to role-playing games in general and Dungeons and Dragons in particular, but I would assume that the Christian Children's Fund was a bit above that nonsense.

So, I'll look and see if I can find a reason why they turned the money (totally approximately $17,000) away, but if any of you come across anything, let me know.

This is just bizarre.

1 comment:

Kaylia Metcalfe said...

I think there is a post-script to this in the Skepchic comments... not sure how much it changes things, but also not sure if you saw it...