Editor’s note: be aware that researching Spawnism will inevitably bring you into contact with disturbing visual content characteristic of the darker corners of the internet. While this piece is tame in a relative sense, discussion of such content is unavoidable.

Roblox is a world of its own, a boundless digital playground filled with lore, social conventions, Robux-powered economies, and the bad actors that inevitably come with scale. It’s a platform where anyone can create new games or play one of the millions that already exist. Every day, around 90 million users log on to play a cornucopia of these “Experiences,” the vast majority of which are built by third-party developers. One of those games — Forsaken, a horror title with over 1.6 billion lifetime plays — has inadvertently spawned (pun intended) a fake theology that is wrapped in video game lore, riddled with pedophiles, and alarmingly characterized by reports of children ritualistically self-harming: Spawnism.

Roblox is a social game and most of its users are minors, conditions which have contributed to the platform’s years-long affliction with an increasingly public predator problem. This is, of course, a small minority of what happens on the platform, which is overwhelmingly loved by hundreds of millions of children. But as the time-tested cliche goes, if you build it (a place populated by millions of unsupervised children on proximity chat), they will come (depraved forces of evil seeking corruptible innocence). Spawnism is one of the latest manifestations of this phenomenon, though its form seems more culturally complex than the digital version of a creepo with a nomadic, windowless candy van.