My parents threw out our D&D collection --they said they were going to burn it but decided the trash would do-- in '83.  This was after they'd heard from their friends how bad and Satanic D&D was, and as they weren't sure about that, they decided to contact the in-law of my aunt's.  After a long discussion one afternoon, they decided that I was trying to learn real magic, so they firmly believed from that point onward that anything with the name "role playing" was Satanic.

Given that Cincinnati is just across the river from the Creation Museum (yes, it actually exists), I'd say we're on the Northern edge of the Bible Belt.  Still, there were quite a lot of people in Catholic Cincinnati who truly believed in the whole Pat Robertson thing, hook, line, and sinker.  I had to really fast talk my parents into letting me keep my Rush cassette collection, because they blew a gasket when they saw the covers to 2112 and Hemispheres.  And while they were fine with reading Lord of the Rings, MERP was out of the question because "it was role playing".  Never mind that actors role play for a living, to their mind it was different than "role playing".

That mindset is indicative of a lot of the crap that I and some of my friends got for playing RPGs.  That actors do the same thing, only without dice, is completely ignored.  The people involved have a very narrow view of things, and their reaction to being challenged with things such as logic are a covering of the ears and yelling "go away!"

The one big takeaway from my time in Satan's Hell was that I became very distrustful of any organized religion.  "Tipper Gore" is still a dirty word to me, particularly when people who have no interest in either listening to the music or playing the games try to "save" me by banning them.

I believe my mom's opinion was that if the fundies hated it, it had to be a good idea.

I first learned about D&D at JewCamp, here in Southern California.  It was a 1 week camp, and the kids in my cabin were playing it, and I was entranced.  Lots of Jewish kids played it, and parents encouraged it as a game involving math, history, reading, and imagination.  They probably thought it was good for honing our future SAT-taking skills.

I did have a friend who wrote a paper on the benefits of D&D for educational purposes, for his Catholic School.  He both got a decent grade, and his mother got a talking-to about the undesirability of said game.

And finally, though this is not related in any way to the Satanic Panic, I had an Asian friend whose mother assigned playing D&D as homework for him.  Seriously, she heard on the radio, or read in a paper, or something like that, that Asian kids had a hard time adapting to life in America, and that lack of imagination was the greatest source of this discomfort.  And then she heard or read somewhere else that D&D was a game that fostered imagination.  So she insisted her kid go find a group to play the game with, bought him the books, and he then sought me out for a game because he saw me with the books at school.

I was pretty incredulous about this, that his mother assigned D&D as homework.  I went home and asked why my mother didn't count my playing D&D as doing homework, and I think she told me to go wash the dishes as a response.

That's about it.

In grade 8, my friend's mom handed him a cassette tape her minister had given her about the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. We all listened to it together before one of our sessions and had a good laugh. I don't think we played at that guy's house again, but that was the extent of the backlash.

Not at all. Actually got my first set of dice from my grandma at Easter.

Quote from: daniel_ream;649545Over on the 80's thread, there's been an interesting dichotomy between people who laugh at the Anti-D&D Satanic Panic crowd and people who claim to have had real traumatic experiences as a result of the panic.

I will state my biases up front: I'm extremely skeptical of the second.  The worst story I've ever heard of is someone whose parents threw out their D&D manuals.  Which, on the scale of bad things that can happen to a teenager, is rather closer to the "Mooo-OOO-om, you're ruining my liiife!" end of the scale.

I also grew up in an extremely secular town in an extremely secular country, about as far from the Bible Belt as you can get and still be on the same continent.

So I'm prepared to be enlightened.  If you were gaming during the Satanic Panic, what was the worst thing that happened to you personally?

I have to admit I was a bit surprised by the reaction as well. It seems like an overeaction to me. I think perhaps people could be lumping in other childhood traumas with the satanic panic. It is also possible they are thinking of a seperate satanic panic that wasnt about D&D but did actually traumatize people. A little foggy on it, but seem to rememebr there was a wierd craze in the states when I was a kid where people were getting prosecuted for being in satanic cults that practiced child abuse and sacrifice-----but the evidence was all pulled from "supressed memories" of victims who were likely being manipulated by sketchy counselors.

I lived in a very religious area of the country during the Satanic panic and had just started gaming. Basically for me it meant I wasnt allowed to buy D&D books or play D&D. But this was pretty easy to work around. I just played at my friend's house. I also had a bunch of my heavy metal tapes taken away by my parents. It honestly wasnt that terrible. No worse than not being allowed to eat sweets or snacks. And it isnt like my parents were mean or evil about it, they just bought into rumors that D&D was linked to satanism, drugs, and suicide. At my church there was a crusade by some members against movies like willow (which my parents didnt buy into). We were a religious household and in that context, I understand the concern. Basically it was viewed as an unwholesome activity. They were good parents and it was one questionable judgement they made in a period swimming ith misinformation about the hobby. So I cant imagine allowing something that minor to carry over to this day, or to claim it traumatized me.

When we moved back to the east coast I eventually convinced my mother D&D wasn't satanic.

My mom got it worse than I did. She had to deal with the church ladies panicking about how I was worshiping Satan. The nosy bitches targeted several moms and claimed some success in getting books destroyed. My mom was a choice target because at the Catholic school, I was a vocal D&Der, metal fan and horror movie junkie.

My mom just figured I was like her father. My grandfather was a crazy Mary worshiper and collected images of "Mary vs. Satan", he loved Wagner and loved old horror movies. Apparently, Jesus' mom had a thing for long, hard snakes.

Of course, I did everything I could to make things more difficult for my mom so when one of the Moral Majority Moms would ask me about Satan, I would proudly profess all sorts of Chick tract nonsense and then see how long it took for Mom to ask me if I said some crazy stuff yet again.

I fully admit that I got off on the fear that D&D produced in these people.

So it never affected my gaming, but we had several kids in our gaming club who could not keep their books at home. They needed their friends to cover for them and keep their books and dice. It was odd, it was okay for them to be "at the mall" for 6 hours on a Friday night, so that was our cover.

This was in the Bay Area.

Quote from: KenHR;649552I was nicknamed "Devil Worshipper" in 7th grade by a bunch of football and hockey jocks in my science class.  Three of them died later that year when they all got drunk and they crashed on a mountain road.  Coincidence?

Note to self: never anger KenHR. (Not without checking my brakes afterwards, at any rate.)

For my part: I was 7 when the 80s finished so I was a wee bit too young to have been impacted. I had friends who had very Christian parents who didn't give much of a fuck about their RPG habit. For my part, I had a secular upbringing in a family which had given up religion some generations back so it was never a factor. I know one guy who wasn't allowed to get D&D books because his mother was upset about D&D... so he got the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG instead. (I guess that's a happy side effect of most anti-D&D protesters having no clue that D&D was one example of a whole class of game - my friend's mother thought D&D specifically was bad but was unconcerned about RPGs ad a category.)

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649554Let's see.

I had my books -- which wasn't a 'couple of books', but rather a large collection of books and Dragon magazines sufficient to fill about half a cedar chest -- burned.  Then it was okay to play again...then they had to be burned again.  Then it was okay to play again...then they had to be burned again.  Three frickin' times, the last one around '87 or so.  Nothing worse than Christians who just can't decide how Christian they need to be.

I gotta say, after the first time (let alone the second) I'd have just hidden the books/left them at a friend's place. Burn me once, shame on you...?

Quote from: taustin;649561Here in beautiful, sunny southern California, I found the whole thing to be hysterically funny. (Note, southern California is, in many ways, socially liberal on the surface. But dig too deep, and it's far less so. And I live Behing The Orange Curtain, which is to say, Orange County, which is very conservative by southgern California standards).


.

I lived in Vista, which is south of you I believe, and this was very much my experience. You hear california and you think liberal, but our community was quite conservative and deeply religious. Even the local episcopal church was right wing. There was also a lot of racism and anti-semitism in that area at the time (don't know if it has gotten better since i left).

The whole rumor about people taking PCP and fighting in the sewers when they played D&D was relayed to me by my mother, who heard it from a church friend (the priest's daughter) who swore her sister's son died because of the game. It was just in the air or something.

I had three or four friend problems over it. One was my best friend, but once his parents found out about the RPGs, he was forbidden to speak to me.

Not a huge impact, but certainly not nonexistent.

It could have been worse, folks.

QuoteIn 1990, families on a council estate in north Manchester woke up to every parent's worst nightmare. With no warning, police and social workers had come to take their children.

Sixteen youngsters from the Langley estate near Rochdale were taken in to care - for what was to be a total of 34 years and four months. It was alleged they had been forced into devil worship and sexually abused.

At the time, there was a steady stream of newspaper stories based on rumours of secret satanic abuse taking place in Britain. But, after a year long investigation, the Rochdale parents were proved to be completely innocent.

I'm not going to point a quivering finger at religion here, fucked up people will do fucked up things. Such is life.

My folks were 50s rock'n'roll fans, they knew what a crock of shit Satanic Panic is. I grew up in the town next to the OP's, religion played no part in my upbringing.

I had two friends who had to quit our gaming club because their parents believed we were all going to sacrifice to Lucifer or commit mass suicide or something.  (One of them was the son of a baptist minister; I remember his dad also Invoking the Wrath of The Lord on the movie, "Footloose.")

Another friend's parents made him cut the magic circle, pentagram, and thaumaturgic triangle pictures out of his Dungeon Masters Guide.  There were three holes in that page.  Cracked me up every time I saw it.

I also recall attending a showing of a movie called "Revival of Evil" during school (this was a private school).  I remember it because it mentioned D&D and multiple rock groups that I listened to (and still do, for that matter).

My mom exhibited some concern ("This is just a big game, right?" kind of questions), but it was offset by my dad, who thought the panic was ridiculous.  

That was about the extent of my exposure to the panic.

Quote from: CerilianSeeming;649563Well, maybe.  There's really no way of going back now and finding out.  I was pretty darn well-liked until about '84-'85, when the local churches really began to hammer on the topic.

Of course, in hindsight its kind-of fun to listen to someone tell me maybe I was too geeky in a place where the highlight of the weekend was hitting the one arcade and the most popular high-school hangout was an empty parking lot next to a mom-and-pop grocery store that held a whole 12 cars.  My whole county was 'geeky'.

I went to high school in rural Missouri. My whole county was drunk. And inbred.

At middle school, we had a young lady whose father was a Baptist Minister come over to us every time we played and told us we were going to burn in Hell.

At home, my Dad thought that my interest in RPGs was equal to his boyhood interest in pulp stories of WW1 fighter aces. Mom, however, was a different story, she insisted that I was going to Meet A Bad End In Life by playing RPGs and wished I would get rid of them. The only time she relented was when I would show her equations from Traveller and tell her it was helping me with my math and science. It still didn't stop her because when I joined the Navy and was away at Basic Training, she tossed out all my RPGs - which I didn't find out about until I came home on leave.

It is kind of funny, because when Mom died and we were cleaning up the house afterward, I found out that she was such a packrat that she saved all of my homework from school. Mixed in with that were some of my old notes from D&D and Traveller during middle school. Like a time capsule.

Today, mainly because I live in the "Buckle of the Bible Belt", I still hear from Babtist fanatics that RPGs are evil and will ruin my life.