The Satanic Panic

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Something I'm remembering now is that some local yokels (a pair of brothers if rumor is true) broke into our school and painted 'Satan Lives!' and other slogans/symbols on the walls. I doubt the motivation had anything to do with pleasing their dark master and everything to do with riling up their gullible elders. I wonder how common that sort of pranking was.

Endemic. There isn't a teenager in America ignorant of the unfortunate truth that the easiest way to not merely rile the grownups and local authority figures beyond reason, but to see their handiwork on the national wire services into the bargain, is to (a) incorporate SS lightning runes and swastikas into their graffiti, within (b) line of sight of the nearest synagogue.

And it carries to many other aspects, extreme overreaction being our national raison d'etre. Want to get out of the 5th period math test? Drop a .22 shell casing (it doesn't actually have to have a BULLET, or anything naughty like that, in it) in the school corridor and you've guaranteed a lockdown. Spraypainting "BOMB" in big black letters on a van, and whole city blocks get evacuated while the state bomb squad is called in. Forget a bag lunch on the seat next to you, and the whole subway line is shut down. Never mind the reactions when three (!!!) Muslims (!!!) dare to enter a Walmart bathroom together, holding suspicious lengths of carpet (!!!)

(I am making up none of these examples.)
 
In High School a friend and I used to joke about sacrificing puppies, worshipping Satan and the like all the time.

Our fellow students knew we were just weirdos and joking but we had one substitute teacher who we inadvertently freaked out with our schtick until our regular teacher reassured her. I felt bad about that.

For drama class I wrote and directed a play called 'Killing Mr. English' wherein we killed our beloved English teacher who appropriately enough was actually named Mr. English. Of course we performed it with him in attendance. It was all very meta.

I also wrote a poem in Junior High English about burning down my school.

All this provoked nothing but bemusement from our tolerant ex-hippie teachers who proceeded to give me As for this kind of behaviour.

All before Columbine and the rather puritan and paranoid environment kids seem to grow up in these days of course.
 
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One of my English essays was a letter I wrote (and actually sent) to some Christian youth magazine, in response to an article warning about the dangers of D&D. I basically pointed out they clearly didn't have the faintest clue what the game actually invovled, and their conclusions were stupid.

What did you write? Did they reply in any way?
 
All this provoked nothing but bemusement from our tolerant ex-hippie teachers who proceeded to give me As for this kind of behaviour.

All before Columbine and the rather puritan and paranoid environment kids seem to grow up in these days of course.

Yep, and we know how it'd all be handled in our zero-tolerance world now. You would not have merely been expelled. You'd have done time. Heck, take that example I cited about "BOMB" being spraypainted onto a van. The van was unfortunately only a few blocks from the town's high school, out on a peninsula (Hull, for those of you who know Massachusetts), and they took the extraordinary measure of evacuating the students over water while cordoning off several blocks. The state bomb squad came in, the FBI came in ... and for a dumb prank that a generation ago would have had scrub brushes shoved into the hands of the two teenage vandals had them instead expelled from school -- despite that it was nowhere near school grounds -- and brought up on federal terrorism charges.

Osama bin Laden has to be giggling in the underworld.

And it leaves me wondering ... what would possibly be the fate of our hobby and of pop culture generally if the Satanic Panic had happened today?
 
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The greatest trick The Devil ever pulled wasn't in fact convincing the world he isn't real, but instead convincing my evangelical parents that D&D was Satan's handiwork, which in turn prompted my mom to pick up Cyborg Commando out of the bargain bin at Goodwill, bring it home and say, "Here, why don't you just play this instead?"

Bastard!
 
In High School a friend and I used to joke about sacrificing puppies, worshipping Satan and the like all the time.

Our fellow students knew we were just weirdos and joking but we had one substitute teacher who we inadvertently freaked out with our schtick until our regular teacher reassured her. I felt bad about that.

For drama class I wrote and directed a play called 'Killing Mr. English' wherein we killed our beloved English teacher who appropriately enough was actually named Mr. English. Of course we performed it with him in attendance. It was all very meta.

I also wrote a poem in Junior High English about burning down my school.

All this provoked nothing but bemusement from our tolerant ex-hippie teachers who proceeded to give me As for this kind of behaviour.

All before Columbine and the rather puritan and paranoid environment kids seem to grow up in these days of course.
I wouldn't try and play Killer these days as a kid, certainly not like we used to.

Shoeboxes with clocks on them and the word BOMB written on them?
 
And it leaves me wondering ... what would possibly be the fate of our hobby and of pop culture generally if the Satanic Panic had happened today?

Moral Panics are still happening today, but we can't really discuss those in the same way. Even beyond the politics, I think it takes some amount of hindsight to make opinions objective.
 
The greatest trick The Devil ever pulled wasn't in fact convincing the world he isn't real, but instead convincing my evangelical parents that D&D was Satan's handiwork, which in turn prompted my mom to pick up Cyborg Commando out of the bargain bin at Goodwill, bring it home and say, "Here, why don't you just play this instead?"

Bastard!

FreeWellgroomedAtlanticsharpnosepuffer-max-1mb.gif
 
I always think the establishment took the wrong message from Columbine and pretty much made everything worse but that's probably not a topic for the pub.

This is an excellent book by a reporter who stuck around and did a deep dive on the facts after most of the media had moved on.

41R+1sIDFyL.jpg

Not surprisingly, most of what was reported at the time and still largely believed today about the causes and motivations of the massacre was wildly inaccurate although it should be noted that was also because many of the 'witnesses' invented details and even incidents from whole clothe in a way not dissimilar to the Satanitic Panic.

One thing that this book really communicates well is how much these kids were suffering from mental illness and the deep grief and regret of their parents.

Plus just how horrific the actions of those boys really was, the detailed breakdown of the massacre near the end of the book is stomach-churning, enraging and deeply disturbing.

This book was widely successful and has done the important work of setting the record straight although I get the feeling a lot of the misinformation about it is still out there among those who don't pay attention to these things.
 
Want to get out of the 5th period math test? Drop a .22 shell casing (it doesn't actually have to have a BULLET, or anything naughty like that, in it) in the school corridor and you've guaranteed a lockdown.
A friend of mine, now married to a Baptist minister (preacher? pastor?) was more direct. In college she just went to the class early, wrote 'class is cancelled today' on the board, and left before anyone else arrived.
 
I wouldn't try and play Killer these days as a kid, certainly not like we used to.

Shoeboxes with clocks on them and the word BOMB written on them?
Yeah, I'd have been arrested and taken away for sure for the things we did playing Killer back in High School 81'- 82'. We used things like trombone slide oil on the rag as chloroform, dart and disc guns, shoebox bombs were indeed a thing, water balloon grenades' etc. I loved my disc gun, though the disc would veer off after a short distance. I took out so many people in the library, theatre room and band room. lol. Fond memories.

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My equivalent to mister Bond's Walther PPK. lol
 
Miller is the demiurge. Rumour has it Earth was rolled up using the T5 world creation rules and not playtested.

As for God, think about the world you see around you.

You spend 100% of your time fully immersed/eläytyminen in the role of an average person
There are no bennies, no do overs, no metacurrency
Char Gen is random
The world out there might react to what you do, but you have no special narrative place in it.

God is CRKrueger. Let that theological realisation sink in.

CRKrueger's not so bad. If he had a cult, I'd join it.

But CRKruegar was originally, in another reality, the imaginary friend of a young autistic boy who was used as a test subject for experimental drugs in a mental hospital.

I'm morbidly curious to find out where I'd fit into this wider multiversal theological narrative...

Bro....shit. Are we like all just Endless Flight's dream?

Well, I do know we're certainly not in my dreams...

My ideal dream would be this but the characters are all hot anime guys, the pearly gates say "Welcome to The Garden State" and Frank Sinatra is replaced by Sid Vicious. lol

 
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And one reason the moral campaigners in the UK like Whitehouss may merely appear less extreme...
I was just reading over this thread and found this interesting. It can sound sometimes like the US was/is more extreme about stuff like this, i.e. having all these panics and strange cultural phenomena.

Like earlier in the thread I mentioned that there was no Satanic panic here, but that's not due to us being super-rational or something. It's due to global popular culture not being available here so D&D never had any presence. American "moral guardians" seem to me to often be grass roots movements of individual parents, etc. This creates more drama and personal anecdotes one can write about and most of us elsewhere know enough about America to follow the conversation.

Where as our moral guardians operated silently at the state level and it'd require a huge amount of exposition to even explain what they were guarding against. I'd even have to get into how religion in Ireland was often far less concerned with actual belief than "correct behaviour" etc.

So yeah, just to say the differences in how well known US culture is and how phenomena like this play out there can create an imbalance that makes it seem more extreme.
 
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Dungeons & Dragons didn't have as big a presence in the UK as in the US through the 80's and early 90's. While it was still the most prominent role-playing game, it had a bit more competition, especially from Games Workshop's early imports of Call of Cthulhu and other classic games. Obviously, Warhammer was coming into it's own at the same time too, and probably had as much public awareness as Dungeons & Dragons did.

I got my first Dungeons & Dragons boxed set the same Christmas as I received HeroQuest, so the two very much go hand-in-hand for me.

Ultimately though, other media was just a bigger scapegoat. Porn, alternative music (lingering punk, rock, or emerging rave), video nasties, etc. Nerdy kids reading books didn't compare to Fulci eye-gouging. Sure, it was not exactly full-blown satanic panic, more a collective disdainful sneer and finger wagging from the self-important.
 
Late to this thread ...

My father was a Presbyterian minister, but he and my mother never gave me any crap about D&D. In fact, when one of the parishioners asked my mother why she wasn't worried about the game, my mother replied, "All he and his friends seem to do is draw maps and roll dice. I don't see the problem."

One of my work colleagues grew up in an evangelical house (parents converted from Catholicism), and he was not allowed to play D&D but could play Top Secret and James Bond 007. (The Bond films were a pre-conversion favorite of his father's, so they were OK.)
 
There's a new documentary on the Satanic Panic out that I watched on one of the Canadian cable services. It is not bad, professionally shot but a bit wooly in terms of construction, it spends more time than needed on a history of D&D which is good for newbies but I felt it didn't dig enough into the actual Satanic Panic itself. Still, for nerds like us worth a watch.


IMDb: : The Satanic Panic and the Religious Battle for the Imagination
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18213242/
 
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I grew up in northern Delaware and south eastern Pennsylvania, got into RPGs because my mom gave me the Mentzer red box in ‘83. Grew up Episcopalian going to church every Sunday and being part of the church youth group. Never had any issues with Satanic Panic in games or music.
 
What did you write? Did they reply in any way?
I pointed out the factual inaccuracies in the article. (It opened with something like, "No rules!" even though rules are pretty much all you actually get when you buy the product. It seems hard to believe they could have been this ignorant, so I may be misremembering, but I actually feel as if the opening was, "No rules! No dice!").

I went on to assert that whoever wrote the article clearly didn't have any idea at all what playing an RPG actually involved, and as such wasn't in a position to draw any conclusions about it. I attempted to correct their misunderstandings.

I received no response.
 
I grew up in northern Delaware and south eastern Pennsylvania, got into RPGs because my mom gave me the Mentzer red box in ‘83. Grew up Episcopalian going to church every Sunday and being part of the church youth group. Never had any issues with Satanic Panic in games or music.
Aren't you lot the Cake or Death people anyway?

I had people threatening to burn my collection (which I'd bought with my own money) from the time I started playing around 5th or 6th grade until I was graduating High School and was handed (or slipped) innumerable copies of Dark Dungeons tracts, and not by people collecting them ironically.
 
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Wasn't the whole thing with the video nasties a related issue? I mean, I know it wasn't specifically anti-satanic, but it seems like a similar mindset was behind it.
 
Aren't you lot the Cake or Death people anyway?

I was also raised Episcopalian and we tend to be on the chill side. No fire and brimstone, no sermons railing against D&D or rock music or LGBTQ folks or whatever. The more Evangelical Protestant sects have always come across as pretty creepy to me, and that's only gotten worse over the last decade.

In the 1980s, I was living in northern Illinois. The priest at my church during the Satanic Panic was a fellow D&D player. I'd chat with him about DMing and various SF and fantasy novels we'd both read after confirmation class. I also babysat his son (who eventually became an Episcopal priest himself) a couple of times; we'd usually watch He-Man and play some of his dad's collection of Avalon Hill games like Wizard's Quest or Feudal.

Evangelical Christianity didn't have a major presence in my town, which was heavily dominated by Italian and Polish Catholics and a smattering of Lutherans and Methodists, so the Satanic Panic mostly passed us by. We had access to a cable channel that carried Gary Greenwald's "Eagle's Nest Ministries" show late at night, which featured a lot of Satanic Panic topics (including anti-D&D rants), but it was something that my D&D group used to watch for laughs. I don't think any of our parents ever saw it, and mine would have scoffed at it if they did.
 
I grew up Catholic. My parents thought the panic was dumb. My older brother raced cars illegally, drank and did drugs in high school. Me playing D&D and computers seemed like heaven in comparison. The religious education classes however did not feel that way. And that's the story of how D&D and screwing around got me tossed out of CCD(catholic religious ed) and gave me a love for the game that gave me back my Tuesday evening...


God bless you Gary Gygax!
 
My folks got the red box and blue box for my brother and me and weren't worried about Satan. They didn't want us playing with one specific group of kids, but that was because they SMOKED WEED.

Side note on Satanism: in junior high I found a 'reproduction' of a medieval treatise on demonology, and my parents even got me fox fur (they had a taxidermist friend) to try summoning a demon who would lead me to buried treasure in the garage (summoning the demon in the garage, that is, it would probably have to leave the garage to find the buried treasure).

Didn't work; I guess when the materials include 'shards of the True Cross' they mean more than just a splinter from a local Anglican decoration. And that's why I still have to work.
 
My folks got the red box and blue box for my brother and me and weren't worried about Satan. They didn't want us playing with one specific group of kids, but that was because they SMOKED WEED.

Side note on Satanism: in junior high I found a 'reproduction' of a medieval treatise on demonology, and my parents even got me fox fur (they had a taxidermist friend) to try summoning a demon who would lead me to buried treasure in the garage (summoning the demon in the garage, that is, it would probably have to leave the garage to find the buried treasure).

Didn't work; I guess when the materials include 'shards of the True Cross' they mean more than just a splinter from a local Anglican decoration. And that's why I still have to work.
As a kid I once tried to get Dolphin Milk from the local grocery store to perform some kind of spell I found in a fiction book.
 
I was in college, had been gaming for years, was no longer living at the homestead, and Massachusetts wasn't fertile ground for satanic panics anyway. (At least until the Fells Acres debacle struck a few years after that.) What my mother was down on was the amount of money I spent on the hobby, and the one time she carped about it I retorted sourly -- having cleaned up over a hundred leftover cans from the family campsite the weekend before -- "Would you rather I spent it on beer instead, like my brothers do?"

Quieted her down, then and subsequently.
 
My folks got the red box and blue box for my brother and me and weren't worried about Satan. They didn't want us playing with one specific group of kids, but that was because they SMOKED WEED.
On the drive to work this morning I was thinking about Stranger Things and how it seemed light on potheads, vs. my experience of that era. The ones I knew were pretty nerdy, loved fantasy/scifi/history/science, but I never knew any who played D&D.
 
On the drive to work this morning I was thinking about Stranger Things and how it seemed light on potheads, vs. my experience of that era. The ones I knew were pretty nerdy, loved fantasy/scifi/history/science, but I never knew any who played D&D.

I can see that. For me, I find that the language is just way too clean considering how people I know talked back then (of course, some of it they wouldn't want to include these days).
 
I can see that. For me, I find that the language is just way too clean considering how people I know talked back then (of course, some of it they wouldn't want to include these days).
There does seem to be an... assumption?... that nerds/geeks were comparatively naive/innocent, when they were actually into all sorts of 'forbidden' stuff, at least the ones I hung out with.
 
I still have bitter memories from the tail end of the Satanic Panic. I grew up Episcopalian in a Military family. My parents were Conservative, but not Fundies. I first got into tabletop gaming through Warhammer 40k and Battletech in 1995 or so. I had managed to acquire a 1500 Chaos Space Marine army. At first, my parents encouraged my interest in Tabletop gaming. It was something the understood, and it seemed, to them to be healthier than spending hours and hours watching TV or playing Video Games. My Dad even helped me paint some of my Chaos Space Marines. Then a family friend saw my Chaos Space Marine codex and remarked that the names of the Chaos Gods were in fact taken from a medieval text on Demonology.

My mom went full Karen, proclaimed that Warhammer was Satanic and threw out my models. Thankfully my parents were Conservative but not Fundie so they couldn't understand how Battletech, RIFTS or Star Wars D6 were in any way Satanic so my Sci-fi games stayed.

How do you think the Satanic Panic ended? What I recall is that the moment when Nerd culture as a gateway to Satanism went from something that Daytime Talk show hosts and Soccer moms took seriously to a laughing stock was when they tried to go after Pokemon and Harry Potter.

Scarmongering about Dungeons & Dragons or Magic the Gathering or Warhammer is a pretty easy sell for the average Soccer mom. "Okay, sure those people are wrong. I don't think a pudgy nerd from the Midwest and his friends are pawns of a global Satanic conspiracy, but maybe BADD has a point. Maybe a game all about maiming and killing and stealing, full of pictures of scary monsters and occult imagery is not healthy for my kids."

When the monsters are cute and the magic mostly harmless whimsical childhood fun, it's a much harder sell.
 
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How do you think the Satanic Panic ended?
It wasn't a big deal in my life, but I remember certain folks getting shown up as frauds/charlatans/dealers in hokem... like Christian 'comedian' Mike Warnke, who had a book claiming he had been a Satanic Priest, was sought after as an an expert on Satanism... but finally had to own up that it was all a big fat lie.
 
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On the drive to work this morning I was thinking about Stranger Things and how it seemed light on potheads, vs. my experience of that era. The ones I knew were pretty nerdy, loved fantasy/scifi/history/science, but I never knew any who played D&D.
We surfer pot heads of the 1970's & early 1980s before joining the military thank you for the recognition. Often I would go straight from the beach to the game shop. Sun burned, smelling of the ocean, illegal substances, Mister Zogs and sand still falling out of my shorts. lol That of course was before I joined the military to see the world and terrorize Europeans. Err I mean drink all good beer.
 
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