Warning Labels and Sensitivity Readers

I spent most of my adult life in construction, building Sonic restaurants and other commercial buildings. Years ago, after leaving that work and returning to school for my master’s degree in creative writing, I released a small anthology under another name. This was around 2018, before Paladin Forge existed and before I had settled completely into the kind of writer I intended to become. Even then, people told me I should employ sensitivity readers.

They were not recommending a historian who could correct a date, a physician who could identify an impossible injury, or someone from a particular region who could tell me that I had given a character the wrong expression. All are recognizable forms of expertise. What they seemed to want was something harder to define: a reader whose identity supposedly qualified that person to judge whether I had represented an entire class of people acceptably.

That distinction remains the heart of my objection. Expert consultation can improve a story. It cannot grant cultural absolution, supply moral permission, or speak with the authority of a people. Writers remain responsible for what they create, and readers remain free to judge the result.

After finishing graduate school, I was recruited by several companies for writing work. One opportunity progressed through multiple conversations before I understood that the company was developing a sexually explicit mobile game. The initial assignment involved roughly fifty suggestive dialogue prompts, and the early material was presented in fairly androgynous terms.

As the interviews continued and the company learned that I was a married man with children, the requested work became more specific. I was expected to write explicit sexual material between men. I still remember lying in bed with my wife as we laughed over the strange direction my writing career had taken. Her judgment was immediate: “I don’t think this is what God wanted you to do.”

She was right, and I declined.

That incident does not prove that publishing as a whole is hostile to Christians. Some companies will ask writers to produce pornography, and others will not. The company was free to request the material, and I was free to refuse it. The episode establishes a narrower point: Christian conscience is still conscience. A culture of sensitivity becomes incoherent when it respects certain moral boundaries while treating others as defects to be corrected.

What Consultation Is For

Writers have always consulted people who know things they do not. If I need to understand military aviation, I can call my father, a retired C-141 pilot, and ask him how it actually worked. A novelist writing about infantry combat should speak with veterans. A designer building an adventure around medieval monastic life should study the history and, if possible, speak with someone who understands that tradition. Research is part of the craft, and refusing to correct a factual mistake is not courage.

I understood that distinction long before anyone around me used the phrase sensitivity reader. When I was young and framing houses to put myself through the University of Oklahoma, I was already writing stories. The most ambitious was a roughly 120,000-word novel, titled The Zoo. It followed two OU students abducted by aliens and carried across the galaxy to become exhibits in an intergalactic zoo, while a secret American space force was put into motion to rescue them.

That story raised questions far beyond my experience, particularly about propulsion and how one might cross such distances. I remember seeking out a professor in Sarkeys and asking questions because I knew imagination did not excuse me from research. I needed knowledge about propulsion. I did not need permission to be myself, to write about two young people from OU, or to portray a young man having trouble in a heterosexual relationship.

Expertise answers questions and corrects mistakes. It does not decide whether the writer is allowed to imagine.

What Sensitivity Readers Can and Cannot Do

The modern sensitivity reader became prominent in publishing during the middle of the 2010s, particularly in children’s and young-adult fiction. By 2017, Publishers Weekly⁠ was holding industry discussions⁠ about the practice. By January 2018, advocates were already defending sensitivity readers against charges of censorship⁠.

The stated purpose is reasonable. A publisher or author hires someone with relevant experience to identify stereotypes, questionable language, factual errors, or portrayals that may feel false. In 2023, The Guardian⁠ described sensitivity readers⁠ as readers who make suggestions about potentially offensive, inaccurate, or stereotypical material before publication.

There is nothing sinister about receiving another opinion. The danger begins when that opinion is treated as a certificate of moral permission.

No sensitivity reader can embody an entire race, religion, sex, nation, disability, or social class. Two people from the same community may read the same passage and reach opposite conclusions. Hiring several readers may broaden the range of responses, but it cannot produce a single verdict called cultural truth. It produces individual editorial judgments shaped by individual experience.

The profession itself remains loosely defined. A 2024 discussion in Publishing Research Quarterly⁠ called for greater professionalization, coordination, and transparent standards. That does not make every practitioner unqualified. It does mean the role should not be granted more authority than its standards can support.

A sensitivity reader may possess valuable knowledge. That knowledge deserves consideration, not obedience. A consultant may correct a fact, explain a reaction, or identify a consequence the writer did not anticipate. The consultant does not thereby acquire sovereignty over the story.

Wizards and the Warning That Says Too Little

The strongest example is not a party conversation or a moment on a livestream. It is a published policy attached to products that customers can examine for themselves.

On its official product page for The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970–1977⁠, Wizards of the Coast warns that some of the legacy material may reflect ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice and declares, “These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.” The page does not identify a particular passage or depiction.

The same warning also appears on the DMsGuild page for Pregen Characters: Human Paladin (5e)⁠, a ready-to-play character created for the modern edition of the game. Again, the page identifies no offending sentence, image, or idea. That specificity matters. When the same accusation appears on two radically different products without explaining what triggered it, the warning ceases to educate the customer. It becomes ritual condemnation.

Wizards owns this material, sells it, and profits from it. The company is entitled to criticize its own catalog, but criticism should be specific enough to evaluate. If a passage is prejudiced, identify the passage, name the product, explain the historical context, and defend the judgment. Do not place half a century of creative work beneath a universal warning that says everything was wrong while explaining almost nothing.

The generic warning should be removed or replaced with product-specific historical notes.

Whose Sensitivities Count?

Christian, Southern, military, rural, and working-class cultures have not disappeared from American life. They remain commercially powerful and widely represented. Claiming that nobody can publish such material would be plainly false.

The narrower problem is one of institutional regard. Within some publishing houses, awards circles, corporate communications, and online communities, these inheritances are more likely to be treated as the unexamined default or as a source of suspicion than as cultures possessing their own history and moral vocabulary. That is not a universal law, and it does not describe every editor, designer, or gaming table. It is a recurring tendency, and it deserves the same honest scrutiny applied elsewhere.

Paladin Forge adheres to the Christian teaching that sexual intimacy belongs within the confines of the home and marriage. That conviction does not require hatred toward anyone, nor does it prevent anyone else from publishing and playing the games they choose. It does mean that sexualized gaming, erotic role-play, fetish material, and simulated orgies do not belong at our table.

That boundary requires no industry-wide theory to justify it. Other publishers may make different games. Other groups may run different tables. Freedom of conscience includes their freedom to choose and ours.

Chaos Gremlins and Small Examples

The Critical Role table incident belongs here only in proportion to what it can prove. In Campaign 3, Episode 28⁠, guest player Erika Ishii climbed onto the studio table during a climactic character reveal. I found it rude and theatrical. Others regarded it as energetic performance or “chaos gremlin” behavior.

That moment does not establish what anyone else at the table privately thought. It does not prove that the tabletop industry has organized itself into a hierarchy of identities. It illustrates something smaller: a corner of the hobby that applies solemn moral language to old books can become remarkably casual when describing discourtesy by a popular contemporary performer.

That inconsistency is worth noticing, but it should not carry more weight than it can bear. One broadcast moment is an example, not a system. The standard I would apply is simple: shared spaces deserve ordinary courtesy, regardless of who is receiving the correction.

No Inquisitions

The answer is not to install Christian sensitivity readers as a rival priesthood. I don’t want every novel or role-playing game brought before a denominational committee any more than I want it brought before an ideological one. Writers remain responsible for what they create, and readers must remain free to praise, criticize, purchase, or ignore it.

That rule does not require anyone to share my theology. Consultants may advise. Editors may recommend changes. Publishers may decline manuscripts. Readers may criticize the finished work. None of them acquires moral sovereignty over another person’s imagination, and no individual reader becomes the authorized voice of an entire people.

Paladin Forge’s answer is Christian because Paladin Forge is Christian. We will draw upon Scripture, Western legend, Southern memory, and the lives we have lived. We will build settings in which good and evil are real, monsters remain monstrous, and heroic conduct means something. That is our confession and our creative inheritance, not a demand that every other publisher imitate us.

That is the line Paladin Forge draws for itself.