The Satanic Panic

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TristramEvans

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MODERATOR's NOTE: Moved this conversation from the OSR Gamemaster Thread, which I'm shutting down

As a big fan of weirdo cults I'm kinda surprised D&D hasn't inspired one.

We've got RL examples of Asimov's Foundation, Star Trek, The Beatles, hell even VtM was associated with a proto-cult double murder.

I'm assuming they existed, but were hunted down by Patricia Pulling
 
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Reading on Pulling I find her story kind tragic and pathetic at the same time. In some ways her grief was exploited and weaponized for political gain by others.

Oh, I think she weaponized it herself quite blatantly

It was definitely a way to focus the blame so none of it had to fall on herself
 
Oh, I think she weaponized it herself quite blatantly

It was definitely a way to focus the blame so none of it had to fall on herself

For sure she was placing the blame elsewhere to avoid taking any responsibility in the personal tragedy but if you read on the subject in Laycock's Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds I think he makes a good point that the money, backing and infrastructure for BADD came from the religious right who wanted to use Pulling as the face of the movement for political reasons.
 
Of all the things in the history of RPGs, I think it infuriates me the most. It reminds me of the 1950s Seduction of the Innocent bullshit with comic books.

It seems like American culture goes through cyclical witchhunts. It's one of the aspects of humanity that disturbs me the most. I lived through the Satanic Panic though, and experienced it's effects firsthand, so those wounds are especially raw
 
Reading on Pulling I find her story kind tragic and pathetic at the same time. In some ways her grief was exploited and weaponized for political gain by others.
There's a really great documentary in a similar vein, Dream Deceivers, about a woman who sued Judas Priest over her son's attempted suicide. Sad, sad stuff, but also a really stark portrait of a family's denial. It's on YouTube. It's... not an easy watch at times.
 
For sure she was placing the blame elsewhere to avoid taking any responsibility in the personal tragedy but if you read on the subject in Laycock's Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds I think he makes a good point that the money, backing and infrastructure for BADD came from the religious right who wanted to use Pulling as the face of the movement for political reasons.

Sure, but I don't see her as the victim in that case, rather a willing collaborator
 
It seems like American culture goes through cyclical witchhunts. It's one of the aspects of humanity that disturbs me the most. I lived through the Satanic Panic though, and experienced it's effects firsthand, so those wounds are especially raw
As an '80s metalhead and D&D fan, man do I remember this. From the McMartin Preschool trial to "backwards masking", it was a weird time to be alive.
 
Roleplaying is a natural human activity and has been so for millennia. Children do it from a very young age. A couple guys codify some rules for a game with some fantastical elements like magic and all of the sudden it’s a most evil thing.

I guess it’s like the Salem Witch Trials in modern times.
 
Sure, but I don't see here as the victim in that case, rather a willing collaborator
It can be both, just like James Dallas Egbert. Sure, he and his lawyer lied to sell books and make money off Satanic Panic. But Egbert was not well, and wound up taking his own life. If only people had encouraged him to get the help he needed instead of blaming his problems on D&D, he might have lived.
 
Roleplaying is a natural human activity and has been so for millennia. Children do it from a very young age. A couple guys codify some rules for a game with some fantastical elements like magic and all of the sudden it’s a most evil thing.

I guess it’s like the Salem Witch Trials in modern times.
No one's been put to death, let's not get too crazy here.
 
I meant from the angle and how people get all “frothy”, for lack of a better term.

D&D players, designers, etc. got off relatively easy compared to those like the people in the McMartin and other trials who were falsely convicted and spent years to decades in jail before having their convictions overturned and released.

Although I'm sure some kids were pretty badly scarred by the experience.
 
There's a really great documentary in a similar vein, Dream Deceivers, about a woman who sued Judas Priest over her son's attempted suicide. Sad, sad stuff, but also a really stark portrait of a family's denial. It's on YouTube. It's... not an easy watch at times.

I've seen that, very frustrating to see such absurdities treated so seriously. Also very sad.
 
So, one of my friends growing up was this kid Brandon. Not a close friend, but we hung out sometimes. He was a bit weird and unpopular, and I tended to accumulate friends like that just because I never cared and would hang out with anyone, really. He was really into Bionic Six. I remember that, because no one else was into Bionic Six.

Anyways, he starts seeing this doctor for "emotional difficulties". And the doctor does this regression hypnotherapy, and that's how he "recovered memories" of his father being in a Satanic Cult and taking him to secret meetings where he was ritually sexually abused. I remember him telling me all this, I think I was around 10 at the time. He believed it. I didn't know what to make of it. Anyways, his mother believes it all and she leaves his dad, who is just a wreck because of these accusations, and loses his job, his house. I remember overhearing my parents talking about it with other adults in the neighborhood. It basically destroyed this entire family. I never saw Brandon again no idea how long he had to stay in therapy to deal with this stuff.

And later on, looking back on that, I have to wonder if that could happen, in the tiny suburbs where I was, this story that no one else would probably ever hear about if not from me - it's not like it made the news or anything - how many other families and lives were destroyed like that? By these "medical professionals" who bought into and inadvertently spread the Satanic Panic?
 
I had a CCD teacher (put simply this is like Sunday school but on a week night) who told our class of 9 year olds that he attended a book burning and they burned D&D books and they heard the screams of the demons coming from the burning books.

I raised my hand and when called on said "No you didn't" and then kept disagreeing with him until he kicked me out of the class, and sent me to the office. I had to wait there till my parents came and got me.

My dad was initially furious until he heard the term "book burning", and then did a total about face.

Needless to say, I didn't have to go back to CCD that year. So that was nice.
 
Why didn’t Pulling go after Ouija boards? She was barking up the wrong tree. Now those things even scare me.

lol, the fact that they are copyrighted by Milton Bradley should tell you something...

My best friend's (now ex) wife was really scared of Ouija boards and got pretty irked with me when I pointed out the movie Ouija was produced by Milton Bradley.
 
I had a CCD teacher (put simply this is like Sunday school but on a week night) who told our class of 9 year olds that he attended a book burning and they burned D&D books and they heard the screams of the demons coming from the burning books.

I raised my hand and when called on said "No you didn't" and then kept disagreeing with him until he kicked me out of the class, and sent me to the office. I had to wait there till my parents came and got me.

My dad was initially furious until he heard the term "book burning", and then did a total about face.

Needless to say, I didn't have to go back to CCD that year. So that was nice.
I got kicked out of CCD too for D&D and just being a snarky jackass. Parents if you send a teen to something he doesn't want to do you're just punishing someone else.
 
So, one of my friends growing up was this kid Brandon. Not a close friend, but we hung out sometimes. He was a bit weird and unpopular, and I tended to accumulate friends like that just because I never cared and would hang out with anyone, really. He was really into Bionic Six. I remember that, because no one else was into Bionic Six.

Anyways, he starts seeing this doctor for "emotional difficulties". And the doctor does this regression hypnotherapy, and that's how he "recovered memories" of his father being in a Satanic Cult and taking him to secret meetings where he was ritually sexually abused. I remember him telling me all this, I think I was around 10 at the time. He believed it. I didn't know what to make of it. Anyways, his mother believes it all and she leaves his dad, who is just a wreck because of these accusations, and loses his job, his house. I remember overhearing my parents talking about it with other adults in the neighborhood. It basically destroyed this entire family. I never saw Brandon again no idea how long he had to stay in therapy to deal with this stuff.

And later on, looking back on that, I have to wonder if that could happen, in the tiny suburbs where I was, this story that no one else would probably ever hear about if not from me - it's not like it made the news or anything - how many other families and lives were destroyed like that? By these "medical professionals" who bought into and inadvertently spread the Satanic Panic?
This happens to the neighbor girls. Not D&D related but I'm their late 20's to early 30's they started going to a repressed memory therapist. They started going from having a great relationship with their parents to a crap one. No clue what really went down in that family and I'll never know but it sounds like the same era where repressed memories were a thing. Maybe they're something normal now but back them it was new and just seemed so off. Wish I knew who to believe.
 
There's a really great documentary in a similar vein, Dream Deceivers, about a woman who sued Judas Priest over her son's attempted suicide. Sad, sad stuff, but also a really stark portrait of a family's denial. It's on YouTube. It's... not an easy watch at times.


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.
 
I never got a lot of push back for my tabletop games in Germany (actually got my first box set from our church library), but LARPing got hit by this somewhat harder. Our own Satanic Panic started in the early 90s, after a famous murder case done by a black metal band – same time the Varg stuff hit the fan, too. Then in 2001 some goths killed a co-worker, which re-ignited this.

So people dressing up weirdly at campgrounds (a lot of them church-owned or -affiliated) didn't go down well…

Although I have to say, from an outsiders perspective I'm not as much surprised by the US religious extremists working against RPGs, but how much some RPG discourse has elements that are common in (folk-)theology.
 
For sure she was placing the blame elsewhere to avoid taking any responsibility in the personal tragedy but if you read on the subject in Laycock's Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds I think he makes a good point that the money, backing and infrastructure for BADD came from the religious right who wanted to use Pulling as the face of the movement for political reasons.
So she was used, but with her (tacit or implicit) approval:thumbsup:.
 
There was no Satanic Panic here, but I was curious what actually was said about Dungeons and Dragons in media here in the 1980s and 1990s and found some good quotes:

To lovers of asymmetrical dice, bad heavy metal and yellowed Conan the Barbarian paperbacks, Gary Gygax is a demigod. To regular folk, those few who have ever heard of him, his passion for lead soldiers, sub-Tolkien schlock and pizza mark him as the archetypal geek
....
Close to 30 years since its emergence from a pungent suburban cellar, D & D abides

Although my favourite is from 1998:
One of the more positive American influences on children, unlike that Ally McBeal...
 
I lived through the Satanic Panic of the 80s etc., it was everything that didn't "fit in" not just D&D. What got onto TV about it was late and just the tip of the iceberg. It is not like it has really gone away either...it's just that D&D is no longer part of the Satanic plot (of course I could be wrong on that, it may still be).
 
I lived through the Satanic Panic of the 80s etc., it was everything that didn't "fit in" not just D&D. What got onto TV about it was late and just the tip of the iceberg. It is not like it has really gone away either...it's just that D&D is no longer part of the Satanic plot (of course I could be wrong on that, it may still be).

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
 
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
Not surprised...anything else I might say about the 700 club will likely veer into the political :smile: The best revenge though is living well for all those obsessed with money who said geeks and nerds and computer and science and etc. obsessed kids were "losers."
 
Not surprised...anything else I might say about the 700 club will likely veer into the political :smile: The best revenge though is living well for all those obsessed with money who said geeks and nerds and computer and science and etc. obsessed kids were "losers."
Yeah, though I've added to this "and beating those same people in physical games as well to make their tears extra bitter":devil:.!
 
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