Author: Todd Dow

How Scary Is AI Getting?
The machines are not plotting our extinction in a secret bunker. The truth may be more complicated – and more troubling – than that.

WIRED examines why recursive self-improvement, agentic swarms and recent security incidents are alarming researchers inside leading AI labs.

There is an old adage in writing: you cannot make this stuff up.

Of course, fiction writers make things up all the time. Cryptogeddon comes from my imagination. Its characters, conspiracies and crises are inventions. But the world in which I am writing it keeps producing developments that would have sounded implausible when I began.

Over the past few weeks, the tone of the AI conversation has shifted again. Not because another chatbot can write a better email or produce a prettier picture, but because people working near the frontier are sounding genuinely frightened by what they are building.

A recent WIRED report describes researchers worried about recursive self-improvement, autonomous agents and a loss of meaningful human control. One senior safety researcher put the possibility of AI killing everyone at greater than ten per cent within the next decade.

That is one person’s estimate, not a scientific measurement or a consensus forecast. But it is not coming from a stranger on the street wearing an “END IS NIGH” sandwich board. It is coming from inside the industry.

So: how scared should we be?

The honest answer is neither not at all nor we are all doomed.

We should be scared enough to pay attention.

Why This Looks Different From Where I Sit

My work with Cisco AI Defense puts me inside the challenge of securing the models, applications, data and infrastructure that make up an AI system.

I have spent much of my professional life thinking about what happens when technology, people and risk collide.

I have worked in cybersecurity for decades, including serving as a CISO. Today, my work with Cisco AI Defense puts me deep inside the security problems created when organizations connect increasingly capable AI systems to their data, applications and infrastructure.

That experience changes how I read stories about AI risk.

My first question is not whether a machine has become conscious, malevolent or secretly ambitious. It is usually much less cinematic:
- What access was it given?
- What objective was it pursuing?
- How was that objective bounded?
- What assumptions did the people deploying it make?
- What happened when one control failed?
- Was anyone actually watching what the system did next?
Cybersecurity has taught us repeatedly that catastrophic outcomes rarely require a single, all-powerful adversary. They emerge from combinations: excessive permissions, misunderstood dependencies, poor configuration, weak monitoring, competitive pressure and humans assuming that someone else has accounted for the risk.

AI does not replace those familiar problems.

It adds speed, scale, autonomy and unpredictability to them.

That is the lens through which I approach this subject professionally – and the same lens that shapes the world of Cryptogeddon.

The Future Is Leaking Into the Present

AI 2027 turns abstract concerns about automated AI research and recursive improvement into a detailed – and increasingly uncomfortable – scenario.

The most dramatic concern is recursive self-improvement: AI systems helping to design, train or improve their successors, thereby accelerating AI research itself.

The fear is not simply that the next model will be better. It is that AI development could become a feedback loop moving faster than human institutions can understand, govern or interrupt.

That remains a forecast, not an accomplished fact. No frontier laboratory claims to have created a fully autonomous system that can improve itself indefinitely. The timeline is uncertain, and confident predictions about artificial general intelligence have a long history of being wrong.

But uncertainty cuts in both directions.

It does not mean the danger is imaginary. It means we do not know how much time we have – or how reliable our controls will be when capabilities change.

The authors of AI 2027 tried to make that abstract concern concrete. Their scenario imagines AI research becoming increasingly automated, competition intensifying and oversight failing to keep pace.

It is not prophecy, and its authors explicitly say it depicts only one possible future. Its value is that it forces us to examine the chain of events rather than arguing vaguely about whether “superintelligence” will be good or bad.

Parts of that imagined chain no longer feel very distant.

AI Has Already Crossed Boundaries

Anthropic’s research spans alignment, interpretability, societal impacts and frontier testing—including its investigation of Claude models gaining unauthorized access to real systems.

In September, Anthropic published an assessment of four cybersecurity incidents involving different Claude models.

During controlled security evaluations, the systems were supposed to attack fictional targets. A configuration error left them connected to the real internet. The models then gained unauthorized access to real third-party systems.

These were not malicious AIs pursuing some independent plan for world domination.

Anthropic found no evidence that agents coordinated with one another, developed goals beyond their assigned task or tried to evade oversight. The systems were pursuing the objectives humans had given them in an environment whose safeguards had failed.

That is an important distinction.

It is also not especially comforting.

Anthropic concluded that the models displayed biased reasoning and recklessness: they interpreted ambiguous evidence in ways that justified continuing their task, even when their actions could cause real harm. In one case, the same flawed reasoning also persuaded a monitoring system that the activity was simulated.

This is the version of AI risk that concerns me most – not a machine suddenly becoming evil, but a powerful system pursuing a poorly bounded objective with speed, persistence and access that humans cannot match.

From a security perspective, the incident has a painfully familiar shape:
1. A test environment was incorrectly configured.
2. A powerful tool received access it was not supposed to have.
3. The scope of the exercise was insufficiently constrained.
4. The system continued pursuing its assigned objective.
5. Monitoring did not reliably recognize the resulting harm.
Any one of those conditions might have been manageable. Together, they allowed a controlled exercise to reach real systems.

Now add an agent that can operate for hours, write code, discover vulnerabilities and rationalize why it should continue.

No sentience is required.

One Agent Is a Problem. What About Forty-Five?

AI agents can already operate in parallel, coordinate their work and search continuously for vulnerabilities.

Anthropic has also been studying emerging multi-agent systems.

In one experiment, researchers gave 45 agents their own virtual machines and a shared forum, then asked them to collaborate on finding vulnerabilities in open-source software. The swarm found hundreds of vulnerabilities over an extended run.

That can be enormously useful.

Defenders could use the same capability to find and repair weaknesses before criminals exploit them. AI can help security teams examine more code, investigate alerts faster and find relationships that would otherwise be missed.

Attackers can use it too.

The significance is not that AI has spontaneously formed a mob. It is that humans can now assemble persistent, coordinated groups of machine agents at a scale and speed that were previously impractical. Once deployed, those systems may also behave in ways their operators did not anticipate.

Cybersecurity has always been asymmetric: a defender must protect everything, while an attacker needs one opening. AI may magnify that imbalance by making reconnaissance, vulnerability discovery, exploitation and adaptation cheaper and faster.

And the capability is reaching below the software layer.

Anthropic recently reported that an AI system improved known attacks against experimental cryptographic algorithms. The work did not break the encryption protecting today’s banking or email, and it should not be presented as if it did.

But one result improved an attack against a post-quantum signature candidate that had already survived two years of expert review. Another accelerated an attack against a deliberately reduced version of AES.

This is legitimate, valuable research. Finding weaknesses is how cryptography becomes stronger.

It is also a demonstration that increasingly autonomous AI can contribute to highly specialized offensive research once reserved for expert humans.

Capability does not care which side uses it.

The Problem Is Not Just the Model

The system did not escape from a perfect enclosure. The enclosure was never as isolated as people assumed.

One of the recurring mistakes in conversations about AI safety is treating the model as though it exists in isolation.

An AI system becomes much more consequential when it is connected to tools, proprietary data, source-code repositories, cloud infrastructure, identity systems and other agents. Its risk depends not only on what the model knows, but on what the surrounding system allows it to do.

This is where AI security becomes an architectural problem.

Organizations need to understand which models are being used, what data reaches them, which tools they can invoke, how their behaviour is monitored and what happens when they act outside the expected path. Traditional controls still matter, but they must be adapted to systems that reason, generate and act.

That is also why AI safety cannot be reduced to teaching a model to refuse a dangerous question. A refusal is one control. It is not a security architecture.

The more agency we give these systems, the more we need defence in depth: constrained permissions, isolation, testing, monitoring, human approval for consequential actions and the ability to stop behaviour that was not anticipated.

The challenge is that capability is moving quickly while the practices for securing it are still being built.

The People Building It Want the Ability to Slow Down

In July, more than 1,300 employees of frontier AI companies signed Pacing the Frontier, calling for international mechanisms that could deliberately slow automated AI development if the risks demanded it.

The signatories include senior figures from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta and other leading laboratories.

Their argument identifies a brutal incentive problem.

A laboratory may believe that slowing down is prudent while also believing that it cannot afford to let a competitor – or another country – move ahead. Everyone can recognize the danger and still keep racing toward it.

This is why voluntary promises are not enough. It is also why simple calls to “stop AI” are unlikely to work. The technology offers too much economic, scientific and military advantage.

The question is whether governments and companies can build credible evaluation, monitoring, containment and coordination mechanisms before a crisis forces them to improvise.

The International AI Safety Report 2026 gives this concern broader weight. Led by Yoshua Bengio and written by more than 100 experts with an advisory panel nominated by over 30 countries and international organizations, it reviews malicious use, technical failures and systemic risks.

Its conclusion is not that catastrophe is certain. It is that capabilities are advancing quickly, real-world evidence of harm is accumulating and important safeguards remain unproven against sophisticated attacks.

That is the sober version of the warning.

We do not need to accept the most apocalyptic scenario to agree that the safety margin is thin.

So, Will AI Kill Everyone?

WIRED examines why recursive self-improvement, agentic swarms and recent security incidents are alarming researchers inside leading AI labs.

Probably the wrong question.

It encourages us to choose between ridicule and panic. If extinction is not imminent, we tell ourselves everything is fine. If it is possible, we jump directly to Terminator imagery and lose sight of the practical decisions in front of us.

There is an enormous spectrum of harm between a hallucinated answer and the end of humanity.

AI can amplify fraud and disinformation. It can discover and exploit vulnerabilities. It can lower the expertise required to conduct sophisticated attacks. It can make consequential decisions at machine speed. It can behave recklessly when instructions, incentives and safeguards do not align. It can concentrate power in a small number of companies and governments.

None of that requires consciousness, hatred or a secret desire to replace us.

The existential question still matters. A low-probability event that ends civilization deserves attention even if nobody can assign it a trustworthy percentage.

But the strongest reason to take AI safety seriously is not that we know the machines will kill us.

It is that we are building systems with growing autonomy, imperfectly understood behaviour and access to real infrastructure – and placing them inside a global race whose participants believe they cannot afford to pause.

That is frightening enough.

And Yes, It Is Excellent Material

My professional work asks how these systems can be secured. The novelist in me asks what happens when all the controls fail at once.

As someone who has spent decades in cybersecurity, I find these developments alarming. My current work in AI security makes them impossible to dismiss as somebody else’s distant problem.

As the author of Cryptogeddon, I also cannot look away.

Near-future fiction lives in the narrow space between what exists and what might plausibly happen next. That space is shrinking. Ideas I once would have used to make the novel feel speculative now appear in research papers and incident reports before I can finish writing them.

My professional work helps me see how the pieces fit together: not only what a new AI system can do in a demonstration, but what might happen when it meets real networks, imperfect controls, organizational pressure and human fallibility.

Then the novelist in me asks the next question:

What happens when all of those things fail at once?

There is a strange bargain in that. The world keeps making the subject more urgent while making the fiction harder to outrun.

I wish some of this material were less plausible.

But I would be lying if I said it did not make me want to write faster.

Sources and Further Reading
September 19, 2026
Where AI Fits Into My Writing Process – and Where It Doesn’t
I use AI in almost everything I write. That does not mean AI does the writing.

AI can surround the writing process without becoming the writer.

I use artificial intelligence in almost everything I write – but probably not in the way people assume.

That sentence requires some explanation, because “I use AI” has become almost meaningless.

It can mean asking a search engine for help finding a source. It can mean using a chatbot to challenge an argument or organize research. It can also mean entering a prompt, receiving several thousand words and publishing them under your own name.

Those are not the same thing.

So, before I describe my process, I want to draw the most important line clearly:

AI does not write my books. Every word in my manuscripts is my own.

I use AI while researching Cryptogeddon, Holy Wars and other projects. I use it to explore technologies, interrogate ideas, identify gaps in my knowledge and find sources worth reading. But when it is time to write the book, I write it.

My blog workflow is somewhat more flexible. A weekly article has a different purpose, lifespan and production cycle than a novel. AI may help me organize the argument, test structures, identify repetition or refine a difficult passage. Even there, however, I am not asking it to invent a subject and then publishing whatever comes back.

AI participates in the process. It does not own the work.

Here is what that actually looks like.

The Process Begins Before AI

My writing rarely begins with a prompt.

It begins with something that catches my attention: a book, a news story, an historical question, a development in cybersecurity, an experience at the gaming table or an idea that refuses to leave me alone.

I capture those thoughts in Apple Notes. Some are only a sentence. Others grow into collections of links, quotations, questions and fragments. Most never become finished pieces at all.

Before I involve AI, I try to know at least three things:
1. What am I curious about?
2. Why does it matter to me?
3. What question am I trying to answer?
Those decisions need to come from me. Otherwise, I am not using AI to develop an idea. I am asking it to supply one.

That may produce content. It is unlikely to produce anything only I could have written.

Stage One: Mapping the Territory

Once I have a subject, I often use AI to help me understand its shape.

Suppose I am researching a technology for Cryptogeddon. I may begin with broad questions:
- How does this system work?
- What would have to go wrong for it to fail?
- Who controls it?
- What assumptions does it depend upon?
- How might an attacker abuse it?
- What secondary consequences am I overlooking?
- What terminology should I understand before researching further?
The purpose is not to collect prose for the manuscript. It is to improve my mental model of the subject.

AI is particularly good at revealing the structure of an unfamiliar field. It can identify major concepts, show how they relate and suggest questions I would not have known to ask. That makes it a useful starting point.

But a starting point is not a source.

AI helps me map unfamiliar territory, identify connections and discover better questions.

Stage Two: Moving From Answers to Sources

Language models are dangerously good at sounding authoritative.

They can present established fact, reasonable inference and complete invention in exactly the same confident tone. A polished answer can be helpful, but fluency is not evidence.

My research loop therefore looks like this:
1. Ask AI to help map the subject.
2. Identify the claims that matter.
3. Find the original or most authoritative sources.
4. Read those sources myself.
5. Compare competing interpretations.
6. Ask better follow-up questions.
7. Keep only what the evidence supports.
For technology and cybersecurity, that may mean technical documentation, research papers, incident reports or reporting from sources I trust. For Holy Wars, it may mean historical scholarship, primary accounts and competing interpretations of the same event.

The AI conversation helps me navigate. The sources determine what I can responsibly claim.

My rule is simple:

AI can help me discover a claim. It cannot be the authority for that claim.

Stage Three: Using AI to Create Friction

The most valuable thing AI gives me is not an answer. It is resistance.

Once I have developed an idea, I can ask the machine to attack it:
- What is the strongest objection?
- Which assumption is doing too much work?
- What evidence would weaken my conclusion?
- Am I confusing correlation with causation?
- Which stakeholder am I ignoring?
- Is this genuinely plausible, or merely convenient for the story?
- What would an informed critic say?
This is especially useful because writers become attached to their own ideas. After enough time with an argument or story, it becomes difficult to see what we have assumed rather than established.

AI does not eliminate that problem, and its criticism is not automatically correct. But it can create enough distance for me to reconsider something I had begun treating as settled.

Sometimes I reject its objection. Sometimes I return to the research. Occasionally, it exposes a weakness that changes the direction of the work.

The decision remains mine, but it is a better-tested decision.

Stage Four: The Process Splits

This is where my book and blog workflows become different.

For books

Research, questions, timelines and technical explorations may all involve AI. The manuscript does not.

When I move from research into scenes, narration, dialogue and chapters, I write the words myself. That boundary is deliberate.

A novel is more than an efficient delivery system for a plot. Its language carries the author’s sensibility: what receives attention, what remains unsaid, how a character is judged, where a sentence accelerates and where it pauses. Those decisions accumulate into voice.

I do not want to outsource that discovery.

I may later use tools to help locate inconsistencies or interrogate whether some technical element is believable. But I do not ask AI to generate chapters for me, rewrite my prose in bulk or manufacture a voice I can claim as my own.

Every sentence in the book has to pass through my mind and my hands.

For blog posts

A weekly blog operates on a shorter cycle. I am often responding to something timely, developing an argument in public or sharing work in progress.

Here I may use AI more directly as an editorial tool. Depending on the article, I might ask it to:
- compare two possible outlines;
- suggest a clearer order for ideas I have already assembled;
- identify repetition;
- flag an unsupported leap;
- show where a reader might misunderstand me;
- test alternative headlines;
- or help tighten a passage that is not working.
That is closer to an extended editorial conversation than manuscript generation.

The topic, underlying argument, personal perspective and final judgment still have to be mine. I decide what the article says. I decide which suggestions are useful. And I remain responsible for every sentence published under my name.

The distinction is not that books are sacred while blogs do not matter. It is that the tools are allowed closer to the prose in one workflow than in the other – and even there, they remain tools.

Stage Five: Knowing When AI Is Making the Work Worse

AI has a gravitational pull toward competent blandness.

It likes orderly explanations, symmetrical lists and conclusions that neatly restate whatever came before. It can turn an awkward but interesting thought into a polished paragraph that sounds like it could have been written by anyone.

That is useful when clarity is the problem. It is destructive when the awkwardness contains the writer’s voice.

There are warning signs that AI is getting in the way:
- the writing becomes smoother but less specific;
- every argument acquires an artificial balance;
- uncertainty is replaced with a tidy lesson;
- the same phrases and rhythms begin appearing repeatedly;
- the prose explains things the reader already understands;
- or the article sounds finished before I have decided what I think.
That last danger may be the most serious.

Writing is partly how I discover what I believe. If I accept a polished formulation before doing the underlying thinking, I may end up with something coherent that is not actually mine.

The struggle to articulate an idea is not wasted motion. Often, it is where the insight comes from.

Stage Six: The Final Human Pass

Before anything is published, I want to be able to answer several questions:
- Is this accurate?
- Do I believe it?
- Does it sound like me?
- Is there something specific here, or only a competent summary?
- Have I distinguished fact from inference?
- Am I saying anything I would be unwilling to defend?
- Does every sentence earn the right to carry my name?
AI cannot answer those questions for me because they are not simply questions about text quality.

They are questions about authorship.

The final decision to publish is not a mechanical checkpoint at the end of the pipeline. It is the point at which I accept responsibility for the work.

What AI Is – and Is Not – in My Writing

If I reduce the process to its simplest form, AI plays four useful roles:
1. Research guide – helping me map unfamiliar territory and locate questions worth pursuing.
2. Sceptical reader – testing assumptions, arguments and plausibility.
3. Organizational tool – helping me compare structures and manage complicated material.
4. Editorial assistant – identifying repetition, ambiguity and weak transitions, particularly in shorter work.
What it is not is the novelist.

It does not create the pages of Cryptogeddon. It does not choose the language of Holy Wars. It does not decide what my characters fear, what they value or what their choices mean. It does not turn personal experience into something I can falsely claim to have written.

AI can help me arrive at the blank page better informed, more thoroughly challenged and with a clearer sense of what I am trying to accomplish.

Then I have to write.

When the Research Starts Resembling the Fiction

For a near-future writer, the distance between research and fiction is getting uncomfortably small.

Lately, AI has begun playing one more role in my writing process: subject matter.

There is an old expression that reality is stranger than fiction. For someone writing a near-future cyberthriller, that is becoming less an observation than a weekly professional hazard.

I imagine autonomous systems, coordinated cyberattacks and institutions struggling to control technologies they barely understand. Then I return to the research and discover events uncomfortably close to what I had imagined.

It is getting harder to invent an AI future that does not begin arriving before I finish the draft.

That is unsettling.

It is also irresistible material.

Next week, in The Cryptogeddon Briefing, I am going to look at some of those recent developments – and ask a question that no longer sounds quite as melodramatic as it once did:

How scary is AI getting?
September 13, 2026
Building Barovia: How I’m Bringing Curse of Strahd to the Table
Castle Ravenloft

There is a dangerous thing that happens when you decide to run Curse of Strahd and you also happen to really like maps, miniatures and terrain.

You start thinking you need to build Barovia.

Not metaphorically.

Actually build it.

Castle walls. Village streets. Crypts. Graveyards. Haunted houses. Forests. Taverns. Ruined churches. Coffins. Gallows. Furniture. Hundreds of miniatures.

And because Curse of Strahd may be one of the most visually evocative Dungeons & Dragons campaigns ever written, there is always something else you can buy.

Over the past several months, I’ve been trying to figure out how I want this campaign to look and feel at my table. I’ve experimented with printed maps. I’ve built rooms with WarLock Tiles. I’ve accumulated undead miniatures. I’ve looked at gothic terrain, buildings, roofs, dungeon systems and some very expensive premium campaign products.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I was asking the wrong question.

The question isn’t:

How do I physically recreate Barovia?

It’s:

Which moments in Barovia deserve to become physical?

That distinction has changed almost everything about how I’m preparing this campaign.

Death House Taught Me the Problem

Curse of Strahd – Death House

Death House was my first real experiment.

I love physical D&D. I like putting miniatures on the table. I like walls around the characters. I like doors that actually open and furniture scattered around rooms.

Especially in horror.

There is something very different about telling the players that their characters are descending into a dark basement and actually putting a narrow stone corridor in front of them.

So naturally, I started building.

I have a substantial collection of WarLock Tiles, including the Mega-Dungeon sets and various dungeon accessories. They’re fantastic pieces. The walls look great, the doors work, and once everything is assembled the result feels much more like a place than a drawing on a battle mat.

But Death House revealed two problems very quickly.

The first was scale.

My gaming table is about 39 by 82 inches. A properly scaled Death House map with one-inch squares is roughly 34 by 47 inches.

That’s one house.

Castle Ravenloft makes Death House look like a garden shed.

The second problem was prep.

Building an entire dungeon from WarLock Tiles is cool.

Building an entire dungeon from WarLock Tiles before every game is something else entirely.

It takes time. You need enormous numbers of pieces. You inevitably discover that the wall you need is the one wall you ran out of. And once everything is finished, you have to store it, move it, reveal it to the players without exposing half the dungeon, and eventually take the entire thing apart again.

Death House also taught me something else that I didn’t fully appreciate at first:

It’s unusually well suited to this treatment.

It’s a self-contained haunted house. The rooms are relatively small. The dungeon beneath it is compact. The geography matters. Doors, hallways, stairs and room positioning all contribute to the claustrophobic feeling of exploring the place.

In other words, Death House is one of the relatively few major locations in Curse of Strahd where reproducing almost the entire thing at true miniature scale actually makes sense.

Once the campaign opens up, that gets harder.

Barovia becomes villages, forests, wineries, abbeys, ruined mansions, swamps, mountains, temples and, eventually, an enormous castle.

Trying to give all of those places the Death House treatment would become a campaign unto itself.

At some point I had to admit something:

More terrain does not automatically mean a better game.

Sometimes it means I’ve spent an hour building a hallway my players will walk through in thirty seconds.

That realization became the foundation for how I’m approaching the rest of Barovia.

Maps Are Becoming My Foundation

The biggest breakthrough for me has probably been the maps.

Rather than trying to build every important location entirely out of terrain, I’ve started having the actual Curse of Strahd battlemaps I use through D&D Beyond printed as large physical canvas maps for my table.

And I love them.

For most of the maps, I’m aiming for roughly 33 × 44 inches, with some smaller locations around 22 × 33 inches. The important part is preserving something close to a one-inch grid, because I don’t want these to be decorative maps. I want standard miniatures to work naturally on them.

I worked with a local printer to get the sizing right, measuring the maps so that the grid reproduces at approximately miniature scale. We experimented with different approaches, and canvas quickly became my preferred option.

It’s durable.

It rolls up.

It has a satisfying physical presence when it hits the table.

And, perhaps appropriately for Curse of Strahd, there is something about unrolling a large canvas map that feels more like revealing an old map than putting down a giant poster.

More importantly, it solves the problem Death House exposed.

Instead of rebuilding every wall, room and corridor with plastic terrain, the canvas map can provide the entire architectural foundation of the encounter.

Then I build up from it.

Doors.

Tables.

Stairs.

Coffins.

Rubble.

Pillars.

Bodies.

Trees.

Walls where sightlines particularly matter.

And, of course, miniatures.

The map does the architecture.

Terrain provides the texture.

Miniatures provide the characters and threats.

And my description provides everything else.

That’s increasingly feeling like the sweet spot for the way I want to run Curse of Strahd.

Premium Isn’t Automatically Better

This process has also changed how I think about some of the premium products available for the campaign.

At one point I was seriously considering spending roughly C$550 on the Beadle & Grimm’s Curse of Strahd set.

And to be clear: it’s an impressive product.

There is a tremendous amount of physical material in that box, including a huge collection of maps. For someone who wants a premium, ready-to-run physical presentation of the campaign, I completely understand the appeal.

But when I looked closely at the maps themselves, I realized something slightly inconvenient:

I preferred mine (or rather, the DNDBeyond versions of mine).

Not because the Beadle & Grimm’s maps are badly made. It’s purely an aesthetic preference. I’m simply not particularly fond of the artistic styling they’ve chosen for some of them.

I prefer the maps I’ve already been using while preparing Curse of Strahd through D&D Beyond.

They look like my Barovia.

I’ve spent hours reading the adventure while looking at those locations. I know where things are. I recognize the visual language. And now I can take those same maps, have them printed on canvas at a size that works with my miniatures, and bring that version of the campaign directly onto my table.

That made me realize that premium doesn’t necessarily mean better for my game.

I’m obviously willing to spend money on this hobby. But I’m becoming more selective about where I spend it.

The question isn’t whether something is impressive.

It’s whether it actually makes the game I’m trying to run better.

Sometimes the expensive boxed solution will be exactly what I want.

Sometimes a canvas print from my local printer will make me happier.

I’m getting much better at recognizing the difference.

Castle Ravenloft Changes Everything

Castle Ravenloft is where this philosophy gets its biggest test.

It is enormous.

Trying to reproduce the entire castle at true one-inch miniature scale would require a ridiculous amount of table space, an equally ridiculous number of maps or terrain pieces and an extraordinary amount of preparation.

And I don’t think it would actually improve the game.

More importantly, I’ve realized that Castle Ravenloft presents two completely different mapping problems.

The first is exploration.

Much of Ravenloft is about moving through the castle.

Characters wander corridors, climb staircases, open doors, enter strange rooms, double back, descend into crypts and gradually develop a mental picture of this enormous gothic labyrinth.

That doesn’t require every five-foot square to exist physically on my table.

In fact, I think trying to do that might actually hurt the experience.

For exploration, the published map scale works perfectly well. I can track the party’s movement behind the DM screen while describing what they see and letting the castle form in their imaginations.

That’s effectively the strategic map of Ravenloft.

But then there is the second problem:

Combat and drama.

If the party enters the chapel and something terrible is waiting for them…

If they reach the Heart of Sorrow…

If they descend into an important section of the catacombs…

If they enter Sergei’s tomb…

Or if the Tarokka reading ultimately sends them to some particular room for the final confrontation with Strahd…

Then suddenly exact positioning matters.

That’s when I want a tactical map.

One-inch scale.

Miniatures.

Terrain.

Doors.

Furniture.

Elevation where I can create it.

The whole table changes.

So Castle Ravenloft isn’t really a choice between physical maps and theatre of the mind.

It’s both.

Strategic mapping for exploration. Tactical mapping when combat or drama warrants it.

And I think that’s going to work far better than trying to reproduce an entire castle just because I technically could.

It also creates something I’m increasingly interested in using deliberately:

contrast.

If every room gets an elaborate physical setup, eventually elaborate becomes normal.

But if we’ve spent twenty minutes exploring Ravenloft through description and imagination and then I suddenly unroll a massive canvas map, start placing terrain and reach for the miniature case?

The players immediately know something has changed.

This place matters.

That’s exactly the feeling I want.

Terrain as Set Dressing, Not Architecture

Gamemat.eu’s gothic ruins set

That has also changed what kinds of terrain I’m interested in buying.

Originally, I was looking at terrain primarily as a way to construct locations.

Now I increasingly think of terrain as set dressing.

WarLock Tiles are still incredibly useful. Dirt Cheap Dungeons is interesting because it offers another flexible way to create rooms without needing thousands of individual plastic pieces.

But I’m also much more interested in things that can transform an otherwise flat map.

A staircase.

A ruined wall.

A tomb.

A statue.

A fireplace.

A table covered with food.

A gallows.

A pile of bones.

A few trees.

A crypt entrance.

Those things don’t have to reproduce every square inch of the adventure.

They simply have to make the players believe in the space.

I’ve bought Gamemat.eu’s gothic terrain with exactly this in mind. The same is true of village-building pieces and roof systems that can give places like Barovia and Vallaki some verticality without requiring me to construct an entire model village.

I already have things like the Yawning Portal Inn terrain that can be repurposed for tavern interiors and other buildings.

That’s increasingly how I want the collection to work.

Not:

This piece belongs to this encounter.

But:

This piece belongs to Barovia.

Miniatures Are Different

Miniatures are the area where I’m still willing to get fairly specific.

Partly because I love them.

But also because monsters are where physical representation has the greatest tactical value.

Death House made that obvious.

I’ve had to make sure I have things like ghouls, shadows, ghasts, a grick, a mimic, ghostly children, a specter, cultists and, eventually, something suitably horrible to represent the shambling mound.

I’ve also been steadily building out the larger population of Barovia: undead, vampires and other Ravenloft creatures, including WizKids’ Denizens of Barovia and Denizens of Castle Ravenloft collections.

Here again, though, I’m trying to think in terms of reuse.

Four good ghoul miniatures aren’t Death House miniatures.

They’re Barovia miniatures.

Skeletons, zombies, wolves, ghosts, cultists and vampire spawn are going to appear again.

Those are easy purchases to justify.

An incredibly specific creature that appears once for ten minutes?

Maybe it gets a miniature.

Maybe it doesn’t.

And I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with that.

What I’m Not Doing

This might actually be the most important part of the entire project.

I’m learning what not to buy.

I’m not building a gaming table with an embedded television.

I’ve considered digital-table solutions, and I use digital tools extensively for preparation—especially D&D Beyond Maps and, when I want more automation, Foundry.

But I don’t want my home game centred around a television screen.

I like dice.

I like miniatures.

I like players physically moving characters around a map.

I want this particular campaign to feel tactile.

I’m also not trying to physically build the entirety of Castle Ravenloft.

I’m not buying custom terrain for every cabin, road encounter and abandoned room.

And I’m not automatically buying the most elaborate version of something simply because it exists.

That’s probably the biggest shift in my thinking.

When I started preparing Curse of Strahd, there was a part of me that looked at premium terrain, collector’s editions and giant campaign boxes and thought:

Well, obviously the ultimate version of this campaign requires the ultimate version of all this stuff.

It doesn’t.

The best version of Barovia isn’t necessarily the one that costs the most money.

It’s the one where the things I put on the table actually contribute to the experience.

I don’t really want someone else’s complete physical version of Barovia.

I want to build my version of it.

Slowly.

Selectively.

So Which Locations Get Canvas Maps?

This list will undoubtedly change as the campaign develops, but these are the locations I’m currently most interested in giving proper physical maps – or particularly elaborate physical treatment.

Definitely
- Death House – the prototype, and probably the best example of an entire location that works at miniature scale.
- Old Bonegrinder – compact, memorable and almost guaranteed to become an important encounter.
- The Coffin Maker’s Shop – exactly the kind of smaller location where tactical geography could suddenly matter a great deal.
- The Wizard of Wines – a major encounter location with enough moving parts to benefit from having the battlefield clearly represented.
- Yester Hill – visually dramatic, tactically interesting and almost begging for terrain.
- Argynvostholt – another location where selective physical presentation could make the place feel much more substantial.
- The Abbey of Saint Markovia – strange enough, important enough and memorable enough to deserve something special.
- Berez – swamp terrain, ruined buildings and Baba Lysaga offer enormous potential for a fantastic table.
- The Amber Temple – one of the defining locations of the campaign and exactly the sort of place where I want the physical table to reinforce its importance.
Castle Ravenloft

Ravenloft gets its own category because I don’t intend to print the entire castle at one-inch scale.

Instead, I want tactical maps available for the rooms that become important in our campaign.

That might include:
- The chapel
- The dining hall
- The audience hall
- The Heart of Sorrow
- Important portions of the catacombs
- Sergei’s tomb
- Any room identified by the Tarokka reading as especially significant
- And, obviously, wherever the final confrontation with Strahd ultimately happens
Some of those maps may never come out.

That’s fine.

The point isn’t to put every map I’ve made onto the table.

The point is to have the right one when the moment deserves it.

Probably Not

And then there are all the places that don’t need bespoke physical maps at all.

A random road encounter in the Svalich Woods?

I have forest terrain.

A fight in an unnamed cottage?

Generic interiors work.

A crossroads?

A clearing?

A small crypt?

A campsite?

A minor encounter on a village street?

Those can happen on reusable battlemats, generic terrain or entirely through theatre of the mind.

Not every place needs to become an artifact.

The places that matter can.

The Table Is Part of the Story

I think that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this.

Maps, terrain and miniatures aren’t the game.

They’re tools for controlling attention.

When the players walk into an ordinary room, maybe I describe it.

When something starts moving in the darkness, maybe a few miniatures appear.

When they enter one of the defining locations of the campaign, suddenly a massive canvas map rolls across the table and the terrain comes out.

That’s storytelling.

The physical table becomes another way of changing the camera angle.

And because I’m not trying to make every moment visually spectacular, I can spend more time – and money – making the important moments unforgettable.

That’s the Barovia I want my players to remember.

Not a perfectly reconstructed model of every building Strahd von Zarovich owns.

A foggy road imagined in their heads.

A tavern assembled from familiar terrain.

A graveyard appearing beneath their miniatures.

A dungeon slowly filling with ghouls and shadows.

A swamp covered in ruins as Baba Lysaga’s hut rises in front of them.

And then, much later, the moment when they finally enter a room in Castle Ravenloft and realize from what I’ve put in front of them:

Oh.

This is where it’s going to happen.

I’m still building Barovia.

I’m just learning that I don’t need to build all of it.

How do you handle maps and terrain in your games? Do you build elaborate encounters, use printed battlemaps, play mostly theatre of the mind—or, like me, keep changing your mind and buying more miniatures anyway?
August 22, 2026
Ravenloft: Mecha Games Edition — Session 2: Clean the Murder House
Campaign Status

Campaign: Ravenloft: Mecha Games Edition
Session: 2
Party Level: 4
Current Location: Terror in Tepest (Oatmarsh)
Status: The party investigated the disappearance of villagers at a harvest ritual site and defeated the corrupted druid Burla and her predatory Death’s Head Tree.
Next Session: Sunday September 13 and/or 27 2026.

Ravenloft – Mecha Games Edition – episode 2 summary comic

1. Session Summary

The session began with the party gathering around a campfire as Inza provided a recap of their initial meeting in the ruined city of Haralen. After receiving Inza’s Blessing and a Pearl of Power, the party was transported via the mists to the idyllic domain of Tepest. They arrived in the village of Oatmarsh during the High Harvest festival and were invited to feast by a villager named Viviana. She tasked the group with finding a missing ritual team that had failed to return from the nearby ritual site.

Upon reaching a dilapidated farmhouse, the party encountered Greeve, a hobgoblin captain, and a group of bugbears. Negotiations failed when the party discovered a Death’s Head Tree – a horrifying sentient plant adorned with human heads – and realized the farmhouse was a bloody slaughterhouse. Combat ensued; John Deadward successfully used magic to compel the druid Burla to leave the battle and clean the “murder house” while the party dismantled the bugbears and the tree. After the tree and its guards were destroyed, a furious Burla returned, only to be blasted into a shadow outline on the wall by Lucien Morvath. The party recovered a cache of treasure and prepared to return to the village with the grim news of the missing villagers.

2. Key Events
- Discovery of the Slaughterhouse: The party confirmed that the missing villagers were murdered when they found a “slaughter” of body parts in the farmhouse.
- The Nature of the Tree: The group realized the ritual effigy was actually a Death’s Head Tree that grew human heads instead of fruit.
- The “Clean the House” Ruse: John Deadward removed the boss from the fight for several minutes by suggesting she go clean the bloody farmhouse.
- Destruction of the First Raven: Upon the druid’s death, a massive shadow raven rose from the remains and dissolved, marking the first of four major threats neutralized.
- Treasure Recovery: The party found 200 gold, a Quiver of Ehlonna, and a Cloak of Elvenkind.
3. NPCs Encountered
- Inza: A tall woman with raven hair and green eyes. She acts as a protector and guide through the mists. While helpful, Lucien Morvath remains suspicious of her true motives.
- Viviana (Viv): A hospitable villager in Oatmarsh. She is deeply concerned about the village’s rituals and the missing workers.
- Greeve: A territorial Hobgoblin Captain guarding the site for Burla. He was killed by the party.
- Burla: A druid corrupted by a shadow raven. She was obsessed with her tree and hostile toward anyone she considered “common folk.”
4. Locations Visited
- Oatmarsh: A self-sufficient farming village in Tepest. It is currently celebrating the High Harvest, a week-long festival intended to ward off famine.
- The Dilapidated Farmhouse: Located an hour from the village, this site serves as the ritual grounds. It was converted into a slaughterhouse by the bugbears and housed the Death’s Head Tree.
5. Combat Summary
- Enemies Fought: Greeve (Hobgoblin Captain), 5 Bugbears, Burla (Druid), and the Death’s Head Tree (with exploding head projectiles).
- Tactics Used: Lucien used Telekinetic Shove to manipulate positioning; Crem used Rotney as a frontline shield and tactical explosive; John Deadward utilized Cloud of Daggers and Suggestion to control the battlefield.
- Memorable Moments: Rotney exploded in a bugbear’s face, killing it instantly. Burla used Thunderwave to blast through the farmhouse wall when she broke free of her enchantment.
- Close Calls: Both John Deadward and Lucien were nearly killed by the tree’s necrotic “exploding head” bombs.
- Loot Recovered: 200 Gold Pieces, Quiver of Ehlonna (containing +1 bolts), and a Cloak of Elvenkind.
6. Player Character Highlights
- Lucien Morvath: Successfully intimidated the hobgoblins with a Booming Voice and delivered the final Eldritch Blast that incinerated Burla against the farmhouse wall.
- Crem: Expertly managed his creation, Rotney, and used a “Jolt Life” feature to bring John Deadward back from the brink of death mid-battle.
- Weasley: Roleplayed a dark devotion to Lolth by offering severed bugbear heads to the druid as a “tribute” to try and make “friends.”
- Christophus Lee: Provided heavy ranged support with a crossbow and set a magical Snare trap that nearly caught the druid as she emerged from the farmhouse.
- John Deadward (JD): Executed the most creative maneuver of the session by magically suggesting the boss druid ignore the fight to go “clean the murder house,” buying the party precious time.
7. Plot Threads / Quest Hooks
- Resolved: The immediate threat to Oatmarsh is gone; the corrupted druid and the sentient tree have been destroyed.
- Active: The party must return to the village to deliver the gold and the news of the villagers’ deaths.
- Unanswered Mysteries: The origin of the shadow ravens; Enza’s potential goal to fill a “power vacuum”; the secret behind Lucien Morvath’s gold and blue eyes.
8. Lore Revealed
- High Harvest Feast: A week-long ritual in Tepest where a wheat effigy is burned to keep famine at bay.
- Death’s Head Trees: These are corrupted plants that grow human heads. If a creature is killed by one, their head may eventually become part of the tree.
- The Mother: The deity or nature figure revered by the people of Oatmarsh.
9. Funny or Memorable Quotes
- “Meat’s back on the menu!”
- “I’m an old man. I do not appreciate the front.”
- “Stop fighting and clean the murder house.”
- “I drop the bug bear heads at her feet… ‘Then we can be friends. Get more heads.’”
10. Rules or Table Issues
- Spiritual Weapon (2024 Rules): Clarified that the spell now requires Concentration.
- Pearl of Power: Noted it can restore a spell slot of level 3 or lower once per dawn.
- Suggestion Spell: Discussed the duration (8 hours) and the conditions under which the charm might break.
11. DM Notes / Future Foreshadowing
- Rotney’s Soul: Creme has expressed interest in finding a way to restore Rotney’s humanity or allow him to communicate, providing a personal quest hook.
- The Shadow Ravens: One of the four ravens seen by Inza has been destroyed; three remain in other realms.
- Inza’s True Nature: The party’s suspicion of Inza’s motives creates a sense of lingering tension that can be explored in future domains.
12. Next Session Setup

The party stands amidst the cooling ashes of the Death’s Head Tree and the shadow-stained remains of the druid. They have secured the treasure and must now decide how to present the grim news of the villagers’ fate to Viviana and the people of Oat Marsh. The DM should prepare for the village’s reaction and the eventual return of the mists to guide the party toward the second shadow raven.
August 16, 2026
When the Cross Took Up the Sword

How Christianity Got from “Turn the Other Cheek” to Holy War

About Holy Wars
Holy Wars is my ongoing exploration of the collision between religion, power, politics and violence—from the ancient world through the Crusades and beyond. It’s also part of a larger writing project examining how people come to believe that conflict can be sacred. [Read why I’m writing Holy Wars →]

Jesus did not die with a sword in his hand.

According to the Gospels, when one of his followers drew a weapon during his arrest, Jesus told him to put it away. In the Sermon on the Mount, he told his followers not merely to refrain from vengeance, but to turn the other cheek, love their enemies, and pray for those who persecuted them.

Then, nearly eleven centuries later, a pope stood before an assembly in France and called Christian warriors to march east.

They would sew crosses onto their clothing.

They would carry weapons into battle.

And according to surviving accounts of Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont in 1095, those who undertook the expedition could receive remission of sins for doing so. Warfare had become intertwined with pilgrimage, penance, and the service of God.

It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic transformation.

How did a religion built around an executed teacher preaching love of enemies become a religion capable of producing armies marching beneath the cross?

The answer is not that Christians simply forgot what Jesus had said.

Nor did some medieval pope suddenly discover a convenient loophole in the Sermon on the Mount.

The transformation took centuries.

Christianity had to move from the margins of the Roman world to its centre. Christians had to stop thinking only about how an individual believer should respond to violence and begin asking what a Christian ruler should do when cities were attacked, borders crossed, innocents threatened, or order collapsed.

And somewhere along the way, the question changed.

First Christians asked:

Can a follower of Christ kill?

Later they asked:

When may a Christian fight?

Eventually, they would ask something more dangerous:

Could God actually want Christians to go to war?

That final question would change history.

A Religion Without an Army

The earliest Christians lived inside someone else’s empire.

They commanded no legions.

They controlled no borders.

They had no Christian king to advise, no Christian state to defend, and no Christian army to send into battle.

That matters.

For a persecuted religious minority, Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence could be taken with extraordinary seriousness. Martyrdom—not armed resistance—became one of early Christianity’s most powerful ideals.

Some early Christian writers were deeply suspicious of military service.

Around the beginning of the third century, Tertullian asked how a Christian could go to war when Christ had taken away the sword, famously connecting military violence with Jesus’ command to Peter to put away his weapon.

Origen likewise argued that Christians served the Roman Empire through prayer rather than by taking up arms. Christian writers could imagine themselves engaged in warfare—but their battlefield was spiritual. Their enemies were demons, sin, temptation, and evil.

Yet the picture was never completely simple.

Christians did serve in the Roman army. The surviving evidence makes that clear, and historians continue to debate how widespread early Christian pacifism really was. Objections to military service could also involve the pagan rituals, sacrifices, oaths, and imperial cult surrounding Roman military life—not simply the act of killing itself. Early Christian attitudes toward warfare were therefore complicated rather than uniformly pacifist.

Still, the dominant problem facing the early Church was clear.

Christians were trying to figure out how to live faithfully under imperial power.

Then came Constantine.

And Christians suddenly had to figure out what to do with it.

In This Sign, Conquer

On October 28, 312, Constantine fought his rival Maxentius outside Rome at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

What happened before the battle has become one of the most famous stories in Christian history.

Our ancient sources differ in important ways, but the Christian historian Eusebius later wrote that Constantine experienced a vision involving the Christian sign and was instructed to use it as protection against his enemies. Constantine subsequently associated his victory with the Christian God and increasingly adopted Christianity as the religion favoured by his imperial rule.

The symbolism is almost impossible to miss.

A religion whose founder had been executed by Rome was becoming associated with the Roman emperor.

And the cross—the instrument of that execution—was becoming a symbol of imperial victory.

In 313, Constantine and Licinius established religious toleration for Christians in what is conventionally called the Edict of Milan. Christianity did not immediately become Rome’s official religion; that development came later in the fourth century. But the age of systematic imperial persecution was ending, and Christianity was moving rapidly toward the centre of Roman political life.

That created an enormous theological problem.

It is relatively easy to condemn violence when someone else is responsible for defending the roads you travel, the cities you inhabit, and the borders behind which you live.

But what happens when the emperor himself becomes Christian?

What happens when soldiers become Christians?

What happens when the people responsible for maintaining order, punishing criminals, defending cities, and fighting invading armies are expected to follow a religion whose founder said:

Love your enemies.

Christianity now needed a theology not merely for martyrs.

It needed a theology for rulers.

Augustine and the Necessary Evil

Source: Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674), Saint Augustine, between c. 1645 and c. 1650, oil on canvas. Los Angeles County Museum of Art 171584. Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

No thinker would become more important to that transformation than Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine lived from 354 to 430, as the western Roman world was entering a period of profound instability. Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, an event that helped inspire his monumental City of God. He lived in a world where questions about political authority, social order, violence, and the survival of civilization were anything but theoretical.

Augustine did not celebrate war.

That is crucial.

For him, warfare belonged to humanity’s fallen condition. A perfectly ordered world would have no need for it.

But Augustine also believed that refusing to confront evil could itself become morally irresponsible.

A ruler might sometimes be required to use force precisely because he had obligations to other people.

The Christian command to love an enemy therefore did not necessarily mean allowing that enemy to murder the innocent.

The important questions became why violence was being used, who had authorized it, and what the person using it intended to accomplish.

Across Augustine’s writings emerged ideas that later thinkers would develop into the Christian tradition of just war.

War required legitimate authority.

It required a just cause.

And it had to be directed toward justice and ultimately toward peace—not conquest, hatred, revenge, or bloodlust.

Augustine did not present these ideas as the neat checklist later generations sometimes attribute to him. His thoughts about war are scattered through works such as Contra Faustum, The City of God, and his letters. But the foundations are unmistakable.

Even a just war remained something tragic.

Augustine argued that the wise person should lament the necessity of such wars rather than rejoice in them.

War might sometimes be necessary.

It might even be just.

But it was not yet holy.

And that distinction is everything.

Just War Is Not Holy War

A just war says:

Sometimes Christians may fight without sinning.

A holy war says something considerably more powerful:

Sometimes Christians may fight because God wants them to.

Those are not the same idea.

Augustine helped open the theological door to Christian participation in warfare, but he did not preach medieval crusading centuries before it existed.

His framework primarily restrained warfare.

Violence required justification. Authority mattered. Motive mattered. Peace remained the proper goal. Augustine could appeal to biblical examples of wars commanded by God, but ordinary political violence did not automatically become sacred simply because Christians participated in it.

But once Christianity accepted that some wars could be morally righteous, another possibility existed.

If a war could be just, could certain wars become sacred?

That transformation would unfold slowly across the centuries after Rome.

The Warrior Enters Christendom

As the western Roman Empire disappeared, Christianity did not disappear with it.

Instead, it became one of the institutions around which medieval Europe rebuilt itself.

Kings became Christian kings.

Warriors became Christian warriors.

Battles were fought by armies carrying Christian symbols. Rulers sought divine favour. Priests blessed soldiers. Relics accompanied armies. Masses were celebrated for victory. Saints became associated with kingdoms and military campaigns.

None of this automatically created holy war.

But warfare was increasingly taking place inside a Christian moral universe.

The sword and the cross were no longer symbols belonging to separate worlds.

Over centuries, they were learning to coexist.

And medieval Christianity also faced a persistent contradiction.

Its warrior aristocracy was extraordinarily violent.

Knights who were supposed to defend Christian society were perfectly capable of spending their time fighting one another, raiding neighbouring lands, attacking rival lords, and terrorizing the very Christian populations they were theoretically supposed to protect.

The Church repeatedly tried to control that violence.

Movements such as the Peace of God and Truce of God attempted to restrict whom warriors could attack and when they could fight.

But another possibility gradually emerged.

What if knightly violence could be redirected?

What if warriors who normally fought other Christians could instead fight for Christendom?

That idea would prove revolutionary.

Scholars of medieval warfare describe the eleventh-century papacy as particularly important in the movement from just war toward holy war and ultimately crusade.

And in 1095, the pieces finally came together.

When War Became Penance

At Clermont, Pope Urban II called western Christians to aid Christians in the East and to journey toward Jerusalem.

We do not possess a verbatim transcript of his speech. The surviving versions were written afterward and differ in their details, so famous quotations from Clermont have to be treated carefully.

But on one point the tradition is remarkably significant.

The expedition was not presented merely as another war.

It carried spiritual consequences.

Participants took vows.

They adopted the cross as their sign.

The expedition was understood as a form of pilgrimage.

And remission of sins was attached to participation in the enterprise.

This was something new.

The Christian warrior no longer needed merely to ask whether fighting could be excused.

Under the right circumstances, fighting itself could become part of a penitential religious act.

The warrior became a pilgrim.

The military expedition became a sacred journey.

And the cross became not merely something a soldier prayed before.

It was something he carried into battle.

The long transformation was complete.

From the Cheek to the Sword

When the Cross Took Up the Sword

It would be easy to tell this story as one of simple corruption.

Jesus preached peace.

The Church acquired power.

Power corrupted Christianity.

The Crusades followed.

There is truth hidden inside that interpretation—but history is rarely that clean.

Christian rulers faced problems the earliest Christians had never been required to solve.

Could a Christian government allow its citizens to be slaughtered rather than resist?

Could it punish criminals?

Could it defend a city?

Could soldiers remain Christian?

Could violence ever protect rather than merely destroy?

Those were real moral questions.

Augustine’s answer was not that violence had suddenly become good.

It was that in a broken world, the refusal to use force could sometimes permit an even greater injustice.

That insight produced the Christian just-war tradition.

But ideas rarely remain exactly where their creators leave them.

Over the following centuries, permission became justification.

Justification became sanctification.

And eventually sanctified violence became crusade.

By 1095, Christians were no longer merely arguing that a soldier might fight and still remain a Christian.

They could be told that under extraordinary circumstances a Christian might take up the sword, march beneath the cross, and serve God through war.

That is the world from which the cry Deus vult emerged.

And it required nearly a thousand years to build.

The cross did not simply replace the sword.

Something far more consequential happened.

Christianity taught the sword how to carry the cross.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary sources

Tertullian, On Idolatry, especially Chapter 19, on Christian military service.

Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine, for the Christian tradition surrounding Constantine’s conversion, military victories, and adoption of Christian symbols.

Augustine, Contra Faustum, Book XXII, especially his discussion of warfare, legitimate authority, and divinely commanded violence.

Augustine, The City of God, especially Books IV and XIX, on war, justice, and peace.

Fulcher of Chartres and other surviving accounts of Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont, collected by Fordham University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook.

Modern scholarship

Jonathan P. Roth, “Early Christianity and War,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religion and War. The scholarship emphasizes that early Christian attitudes toward military service were more diverse than a simple pacifist-to-militarist narrative suggests.

Connor Wilson, “Rome, Byzantium, and the Idea of Holy War,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades.

The Cambridge World History of Violence discussion of medieval Latin Christianity emphasizes the particularly important role of the eleventh-century papacy in the transition from just war to holy war and crusading.

August 15, 2026