The Satanic Panic

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the 700 club still brings it up occasionally, and I've run into individual fundamentalists holding onto the idea that D&D is inherently Satanic, but they aren't given the credit or platforms they were in the 80s/early 90s
To be fair, my gran's American and she bought me my first D&D set. Nobody at her church objected, although to be fair you'd have to be brave to the point of foolhardy to have messed with my gran.

(She was one of those Methodist ladies who doesn't *technically* have a church role but everyone knows they'll fuck you up bad if you cross them).
 
Yeah, it got me a little, a lot of kids were playing one year and banned from it the next. As a religious kid from a religious family it was difficult because D&D was really all I had going for me. Years later, a friend of mine, the head of the local neo-pagan society was murdered. That shook me up.
 
My mum banned me from playing Call of Cthulhu because she specifically felt the Lovecraftian mythos was too bleak for an impressionable teenager. And Gamma World because she's an old hippy and didn't think we should make light of nuclear war.

Which I bitched about at the time, but at least she was laying down restrictions based on what the games actually were rather than on some weird imaginary concept of them.
 
I knew a lot of kids who played other games including Call of C'thulhu because if it didn't say Dungeons & Dragons it wasn't satanic.
I mocked it for being uncool as a kid, but I actually suspect a lot of mileage was got out of the Palladium "we condemn the occult" disclaimer. (And it probably stopped worried parents from reading on to the part where one of the character classes is someone who's literally sold their soul to the devil).
 
I knew a lot of kids who played other games including Call of C'thulhu because if it didn't say Dungeons & Dragons it wasn't satanic.

Yeah, I encountered a few like that

I mean, probably never would have gotten to play Earthdawn otherwise, so there's that at least
 
I mocked it for being uncool as a kid, but I actually suspect a lot of mileage was got out of the Palladium "we condemn the occult" disclaimer. (And it probably stopped worried parents from reading on to the part where one of the character classes is someone who's literally sold their soul to the devil).
Kobolds Ate My Baby had the best disclaimer.
 
As a kid my dad encouraged my interest in Star Frontiers over D&D. Part of that was surely that he'd been a Star Trek fan since its original TV run and liked sf but had no interest in fantasy, but also looking back I suspect it's because he attended a fundamentalist church (I didn't go with him - my parents were divorced and we continued to go to the Methodist chruch with my mom and grandma) that I'm sure condemned D&D and he probably felt like SF was a safer, less controversial, alternative.
 
My mom saw my copies of DC Heroes and Marvel Super Heroes and probably thought “I’m lucky to have a son with such exquisite taste in games”.
My older brother was cool and got into lots of trouble. I strongly suspect my parents put a computer in my bedroom and a bought me RPGs to solve any future problems in that area...
 
My mother fell for that crap in 82'. While I was visiting her in the summer she went through my gaming stuff I'd brought over and decided to throw it all away. I was out with her husband working a summer job doing gofor on the construction site and returned to it gone. She thought it demonic and that I had floor plans to businesses. Yeah she thought the dungeon maps were maps of actual local businesses.

What really pissed me off was she also threw away my friend Steve's stuff I had with me at the time to read through. Couple hundred dollars of books (price at that time btw). I ended up giving him $500.00 later on to repay him because I felt so bad about it.
 
I'm just watching it now. I had empathy for the mother up until the point the father is sitting there bragging about how he started punching the kid when he misbehaved because he was too old to spank, and the mother is sitting beside him with a smile on her face, obviously oblivious to anything being wrong with that. The father laughs about how after beating him up, the kid swore he'd never smoke a joint again, like he's proud of himself, and here they are in court blaming a music band for their son's attempted suicide.
Yeah, in my case both of my parents had substance abuse/mental health issues, but chose to blame D&D and/or comics for my behavioral problems. Pretty absurd, the lengths people will go to in order to avoid looking at, or even acknowledging, their own shit. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to lay all my shit off on my parents, but for them to think D&D was responsible for anything was ridiculous. Love my folks, came to terms with all that shit a long time ago, etc., but still, I can see what they couldn't. I remember one time my dad, who HATED me playing RPGs as a kid, excitedly bought me one from a yard sale, and brought it to me in my early 20s (Lee Gold's Lands of Adventure, and, no, I don't still have it). I really appreciated that gesture. Not sure I ever told him how much. I guess what I'm trying to say is, my folks got better and so did I. But, yeah, the whole reputation of D&D was so strange. You'd think my dad, who as a teenager had one of his Frank Zappa records tossed into the street by my grandfather because it contained the word "fuck", would have had some inkling.

It's weird to me how people don't really seem to listen to their kids. When I used to manage restaurants, I remember a teenage girl who worked for me who was HUGE into church, wanted to be a minister, etc. But she was also a kid, dyed her hair, listened to Christian rock, etc. Her parents gave her so much shit for these inncouous, normal teenage behaviors. I felt bad for her. Let a kid be a kid. If they're not getting up to the kind of shit my friends and I used to get up to, they'll probably be fine, or close enough to it.

I remember waiting in line in a toy store, as a grown-ass adult (I think I was buying Christmas presents), and the dude in front of me (twentysomething) talking to his female companion, looking at a display and sneering, "If my kid ever wants to play D&D, I'll wring his neck. I played it once, it was all about power and money." Or something very close to that, I remember "wring his neck" clear as day. It was such a bizarre statement. He seemed legit angry.

No idea where I'm going with this.
 
I know where you were going with it.

Let people explore life and try things. Not everyone who plays RPGs is going to like them, but don’t stop them from giving it a shot.

Also, don’t be a hypocrite. Kids know when they see one.
 
Having kids pretty much guarantees you'll be a hypocrite at some point. Mostly because kids are incompetent morons half the time and brilliant the other half and you don't get to pick when they'll be what. So yeah you'll tell them don't do X when they are in brilliant mode some times and take them to the ER sometimes when you trust them and they are stupid.

That's just payback from your parents for when you were young
 
I was lucky enough (how's that for a euphemism for old) to start gaming before the Satanic Panic stuff. So we used to meet for games every Saturday at the local public library--never had any complaints, except about being too loud. And when we started our own D&D fanzine, my parents put up a little money for producing the first couple of issues--basically, for photocopying costs at Kinkos.

I wonder if Tom Hanks has ever said anything about 'Mazes and Monsters' all these years later...
 
I honesty cannot think of a single Tom Hanks show or movie that I like....I guess Mazes & Monsters is the closest, but that's more bemusement at it's awfulness and ridiculous fearmongering
 
Dragnet I think I liked, a while ago now.

Oh, yep, that is one I liked. Forgot about it, don't think I've seen it in 30 years.

But oddly appropriate to the thread

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I honesty cannot think of a single Tom Hanks show or movie that I like....I guess Mazes & Monsters is the closest, but that's more bemusement at it's awfulness and ridiculous fearmongering
I don't think I've ever heard someone say that. The guy's got a pretty impressive filmography.

My favorites:
Band of Brothers
Road to Perdition
Apollo 13
Saving Private Ryan
Catch Me If You Can
That Thing You Do!
A League of Their Own
The Burbs

Honorable mentions to Big, Joe Versus the Volcano, Forrest Gump, Sleepless in Seattle/You've Got Mail (I can be a sucker for a 90s romcom once in a while), Green Mile, Ladykillers, and Turner & Hooch.
 
I don't think I've ever heard someone say that. The guy's got a pretty impressive filmography.

My favorites:
Band of Brothers
Road to Perdition
Apollo 13
Saving Private Ryan
Catch Me If You Can
That Thing You Do!
A League of Their Own
The Burbs

Honorable mentions to Big, Joe Versus the Volcano, Forrest Gump, Sleepless in Seattle/You've Got Mail (I can be a sucker for a 90s romcom once in a while), Green Mile, Ladykillers, and Turner & Hooch.
Yeah; I'd add News of the World, Bridge of Spies, and Charlie Wilson's War to that list. And, of course, he's the voice of Woody in Toy Story.

I've always found his performance in Philadelphia a little overdone, but it's worth a mention too.
 
I was in a very religious community at the height of the Satanic Panic (it was much bigger than RPGs, it was part of a larger phenomenon and the D&D stuff was just a small aspect of it). Most of the people who fell for it believed they were doing the right thing I think. And that is what makes moral panics so insidious. I will say, the only bad thing that happened to me as a result of it, was my metal tapes and my D&D books got taken away from a few years. And it was part of an effort to make sure there weren't bad influences on me. If you grew up in that kind of religious environment, this applied to any media you consumed. Things were always vetted and there was a lot of concern placed on anything that might be satanic or blasphemous. So I don't carry personal resentment about it (at least as far as my own parents are concerned). That is just how my parents wanted to raise me at the time (and they loosened up as we got older and as they moved away from that community). At the same time it made me very wary of such movements. I remember oleplaying games were a relatively new thing for most people, so there was this cloud around it that allowed experts, concerned parents, educators and journalists to speculate on its impact on peoples minds. One thing I do remember is a lot of this being fueled by bad journalism and by groups like the 700 club. As I got older, when I encountered this stuff, often from very good people who sincerely thought there was evil in what I was reading, writing, listening to, I learned to show them how it wasn't what they thought it was (didn't work for everyone, but I found trying to explain it had a better impact). That is actually how I got my mom to give me my Iron Maiden albums again. I found the hymn in the hymn book at our church from the song Revelations and showed it to her (she had originally read that song as blasphemous)
 
the 700 club still brings it up occasionally, and I've run into individual fundamentalists holding onto the idea that D&D is inherently Satanic, but they aren't given the credit or platforms they were in the 80s/early 90s

Don't know if this has been posted yet, but this is something from the 700 club in 89

 
I feel as though the actual Censorship Board got to be a couple of steps above that.
Yeah they were pretty "strange" to use a polite term, but I think it's very different in nature from the Satanic Panic. Even the way they would censor trivial stuff from Dublin magazines but Cúirt an Mheán Oiche was left uncensored because it was "native" despite being more explicit than most banned works. It's a very different milieu from the Satanic Panic.
 
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