Holy War

In 2005, to protest the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to make “intelligent design” in the classroom, graduate student Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the School Board demanding that they give equal classroom time to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Henderson outlined his belief in an invisible, supernatural creator called the Spaghetti Monster, whose existence could be neither proven nor disproven, and insisted that the Monster deserved a place in the curriculum along with the story of “intelligent design.”

People didn’t just get the joke -- they actually laughed. And they started “worshipping” the Spaghetti Monster. Across college campuses, the new religion, often known as “Pastafarianism,” spread like wildfire.

The new parody cult had a huge effect on AssHoTech. From 2005 onward, virtually all of AssHoTech’s interns and new, under-25 employees have been self-described Pastafarians, a semi-private joke they find immensely satisfying.

For AssHoTech’s Gen-X workers, however, it’s a joke they’ve heard before. Virtually all of that generation have some affiliation with Ivan Stang’s Church of the Subgenius -- which, they will be happy to tell you, is the “original joke religion.” Now that they are older (and have even come to resemble Subgenius deity Bob Dobbs), the Gen-Xers are unwilling to tolerate a bunch of whippersnappers who think they’ve invented religious parody out of whole cloth.

Thus began the Joke Jihad. It started when a Subgenius painted the slogan (“Love + Slack”) on the shell of his warcrab, which then proceeded to torture a new employee’s crab to a miserable death in the ring. Later, a Subgenius player’s crab was found murdered in a storeroom -- a death that would have been attributed to rogues, if not for the graffiti found at the site: “There is no God but pasta, and Captain Mosey is its prophet.”

Since then, sectarian warfare has become part of the crabfighting culture. New players are encouraged to declare themselves either Pastafarian or Subgenius, and they occasionally engage in gangland-style warfare.

If your group decides to play the holy war, each player should declare a religion. They will then be governed by the following rules:

1) Players of the same religion can fight each other in the crabfighting ring. However, in group combat, “religious” crabs are required to eliminate all crabs from the opposing religion before attacking their own co-religionists.

2) The crabfighting code prohibits one crabfighter from attacking another directly, outside the bounds of a fair and formal crabfight. However, individual fighters may pool their resources to launch plausibly-deniable surprise attacks on their opponents. For $2.00 in game cash, a player or group of players may by a completely new, unnamed crab for use in a surprise, kamikaze attack on another crab. Any equipment for the kamikaze crab must be purchased at additional expense to the attackers.

3) The attackers decide when and where the kamikaze will attack, but the RogueMaster controls the kamikaze crab during combat.

4) A kamikaze crab will always fight to the death.

5) The RogueMaster cannot reveal the identity of the attackers.