Quote from: tenbones;1114430... and those that truly are trying to raise the Lord of Hell from the Pit.

Dude, but the guy always brings SNACKS!

Quote from: jeff37923;1114451Dude, but the guy always brings SNACKS!

Like you, I undersold the value of my soul. But damn, Doritos are probably worth it.

It's true.  I always bring snacks.

Quote from: hedgehobbit;1113631Not only did it vary by region but it overall effect has been vastly overblown in the last two decades. If it wasn't for the constant belly-aching by RPGers, no one would even remember it.

  I disagree here.  I remember teachers banning the books being brought to school and a friend of mine had to get rid of his books because his dad bought into some of the hype after the kid in michigan went missing.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1114404The whole "D&D is satanic" thing only really affected people who grew up in very conservative religious families, mainly evangelicals but also the non-liberal catholics.

Not really. It got ahold of families way outside those demographics. Stackpole and others have commented on just how widespread the problem got outside the religious circles.

Quote from: Omega;1114739Not really. It got ahold of families way outside those demographics. Stackpole and others have commented on just how widespread the problem got outside the religious circles.

Having been a kid during that period, I can only recall one person around me who was really affected by all that. Though I guess there may have been other kids interested in D&D who were never allowed to get into it because of the panic, so you have to count those losses as well.

On the other hand, there was a lot of the lure of the forbidden in it, which made it more appealing for certain kids to play (especially the stoners and the ones into heavy metal). The 80s rumor that playing D&D would make you a satanist was WAY better than the 90s rumor that playing D&D would make you a lifelong virgin.

The Satanic Panic had a small effect on the RPG hobby where I lived (suburbs of a major Canadian city). A few kids had parents who wouldn't let them play, or who took their books away.

But people who weren't there also need to understand that this was in the context of SF/Fantasy stuff being considered really weird and unhealthy for reasons that had nothing to do with religion. If you were still reading books about elves and spaceships when you were older than about 12 years old, parents, teachers, and other kids considered you immature and socially stunted. The same way they would a teenager sitting on the sidewalk playing with tonka trucks and making vroom-vroom noises. It's probably difficult for younger people to understand, but back then being outside the mainstream was considered unhealthy, and authority figures had little tolerance of deviance. There was no 'you do you' back in 1982.

So me and my friends got much more grief from wider society for being immature nerds carrying monsters manuals around than we did for playing a game that offended conservative religious sensibilities.

The effect of the Satanic Panic, even limited to the RPG hobby, wasn't just parents taking away rulebooks or schools banning the game in after school clubs. Law enforcement was taught to see D&D rulebooks as one kind of evidence of satanic crimes (along with intelligence and creativity); although I doubt that D&D was ever the only evidence, lives were actually ruined by baseless prosecutions.

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/satanic-panic-documents/