AhmedKarim wrote:1. It uses real terms from a real religion. I think it's a little bit gross.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. However, I don't think it's a good idea for game designers to try to avoid offending people, because there will always be people who will choose to find something offensive, and changing games in response to those complaints generally leads to an endless stream of increasingly minor complaints, meaning a lot of extra development work when nothing was really wrong in the first place. Especially in an open source game like Crawl, players can just download the source code and make any edits they want, so I see no reason why any change should be made to the official code base just to satisfy a complaint because a player chooses to find some detail of the game offensive or gross.
2. It demonstrates the followers of this religion as "stupid berserks".
I don't see any -Int stat on the sword, so I don't know where you're getting the idea of "stupid" from. Also, keep in mind that this is a
fantasy game, and does not accurately model reality or demonstrate anything about the real world or the people in it.
3. The "Jihad" phenommenon is misinterpreted.
From what a muslim friend of mine has told me about Islam, "Jihad" is a religious duty that muslims have to spread Islam peacefully when possible, and through violence when peaceful methods don't work. In Crawl, it's best to deal with situations without berserking when possible (due to the costs and downsides), and berserk when you need the extra power boost, which somewhat resembles the idea of using peaceful methods when possible, to the extent that such a concept could reasonably be represented in a game that's almost entirely about various forms of fantasy violence. The sword is holy branded, which fits with the idea of being religious. The neat feature of having allies berserk when you do suggests a sort of solidarity in thinking, which is what ideologies, religious or otherwise, are all about. All in all, the name seems extremely appropriate thematically to me.