Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Daub

I'm going to start a panic about Clue teaching kids to commit murder.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we get to talking about the satanic panic.

And this time we're talking about it with Adrienne Daub, co-host of Embed with the Right.

and a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, enthusiast, which is wonderful for us because today we're talking about the part of the satanic panic that was fixated back in the 80s not on the idea that daycare workers were infiltrating preschools as part of organized satanic cults so that they could gain access to children to engage in cult rituals.

But instead, the part of the satanic panic focused on the fear of Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game that you might think of as a harmless way to spend time with your friends, but according to some satanic panic organizers and entrepreneurs, was actually a game capable of breaking the brains of teenagers, especially new college students, severing them from reality, and driving them to devil worship, or worse.

This is an episode about one of the more ridiculous corners of the satanic panic, but it's also an episode about parents trying to understand what to do with information that they perhaps don't have a way to handle.

And in this case, it's about a panic over a game that is spawned to some extent by parental grief over the death by suicide of teenage children.

So this episode certainly gets into that subject matter at times, and I would say that you can't talk about one part of the satanic panic without talking about all of the more complex implications of the whole thing.

But this is also an episode where we do talk about Dungeons and Dragons quite a lot, and I do think that it might make some of you want to go start a campaign after you listen to this episode.

If you want to find more of our show, you can of course always do that on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

We have an episode up there right now that I really love about the sequel to Rosemary's Baby, Son of Rosemary.

I get to talk about it with Sarah Archer at great length.

I got to do a little bit of a Jerry Orbach impression.

It's not a good sequel, but is it a delight to talk about?

It is.

And that's what I'm always looking for.

And our next bonus episode that we're putting out is kind of a sequel to the episode you're about to listen to, because we're talking about Mazes and Monsters, the TV movie that capitalized on and helped legitimize the panic over Dungeons and Dragons and also includes Tom Hanks in his first leading role.

And you know what?

He's good in it.

Okay, that's all you need to know.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for coming with us once again on this trip to the Satanic Panic.

Here's your episode.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where from the beginning we've been talking about the Satanic Panic and today we are talking about the role-playing game aspect of it.

And we are talking about it with Adrian Daub.

Adrian, hello.

Hi.

Thank you for being here.

How is your

summertime going?

It's going well.

I was in Europe for a little while.

I'm from Germany originally, and so I got to go home a little bit.

And I, yeah, I've been back for a couple of days.

You leave this country alone for five minutes and the things we get up to.

I know, I know.

And I mean, who knows when this will air, but like, yeah, you've definitely been keeping me in suspense.

Yeah, it's safe to say that when this comes out, we'll not be in a more normal place.

No, no.

Listeners are encouraged to just attach whatever I just said to whatever craziness came down the pike this particular week.

Yeah,

fill in the blank.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a mad lib.

It's, can you believe that Lindsey Graham was caught in Flagrante de Licto with his aunt farm?

And it's like, yeah, I believe that.

Yeah.

And what else do you do when you're not talking to me on this show?

So I'm a professor at Stanford University.

I'm a literary scholar by training, and I am a podcaster too.

I have two podcasts, Inbed with the Right and The Feminist Present, both of which you've been on, which was great.

And I also have harbored a long time fascination with moral panics.

Yeah.

In particular, I've got a book coming out in September about the cancel culture panic.

And the other thing about me is that I've been playing role-playing games for quite a long time.

And so this was sort of the moral panic that I watched sort of take shape as I was engaging in the behavior everyone was freaking out about, which, you know, is not every moral panic, but it's certainly something that I feel like gives one a really, really interesting and acute view of like how these things come together, right?

Like I was like, wait, I do these things and I don't think I'm getting into Satanism, right?

Like, yeah, that's what you think.

That's what Satan wants you to think.

I know.

That's what Big Satan was trying to get me to accept.

Yeah.

The internal memos that were leaked from Big Satan.

Yeah.

You know, so central to the satanic panic, of course, is like panic over kids, but it's so interesting to look at.

For me to take a second and situate this, you know, and with the satanic panic also, the more I learn about it, the less I feel confident in many ways speaking to cause and effect because you think, well, you know, sometimes a lake is formed by a river and sometimes a river is formed by many smaller tributaries.

Maybe this is a good place to hand it to you because I think my research has focused more on the intense fears that adults are feeling and get to channel through rumors of Satanism for the welfare of little children, many of whom are going into some kind of a daycare situation and in larger numbers than has occurred in the past, and also into a lot of private daycare and kind of jerry-rigged, underfunded daycare because Reagan has just slashed daycare funding.

Right.

Obviously.

Then not to leave anybody out of the party, we have probably an equally sized panic about older children and particularly adolescents.

And I feel like that's where we get into your territory.

That's exactly right.

I do think that like unlike the kind of satanic panic around schools and daycares in the 80s, this one is a think about the children kind of panic, but the children children keep inching up.

And that way, it is actually a lot like our college panics of today or the trans panic, right?

Which, like, the panic around trans kids, which ends up kind of being about these people who transition in their 20s.

And you're like, I'm sorry, when does someone stop being a child?

45.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and so this is very noticeable here, that a lot of the cases are implicitly about middle and high schoolers, but then a lot of examples are pulled from colleges.

And some of this, honestly, I tried to research this as much as I could.

It's unclear to me how successful DND was at which age bracket.

I'll have a little bit more to say about that maybe later, but like it does appear to have been kind of a college phenomenon as well, meaning it then becomes really, really hard to kind of yell about it because, like, well, yeah, as you say, these people can be drafted into war.

Surely

they can roll a 20-side and die without running a serious risk to their febrile imagination, right?

Like,

you would hope so.

The contrast is striking.

Yeah, and I, I wonder, is it a good place to start by asking what is Dungeons and Dragons?

Yeah, happy to explain that a little bit.

Nice.

So, Dungeons and Dragons, it's over 50 years old by now, is a fantasy role-playing game and first started in 1973.

It outlived Roe v.

Wade.

Congrats.

I know, my God, yeah.

I mean,

basically, it grew out of sort of tactical wargaming.

Like Risk, although I don't know if that existed yet.

That did exist, but no, this is a little bit more involved.

This is the kind of stuff where people build like terrain and like measure

with like rulers how far their

Napoleonic army miniatures can move, that kind of thing.

So it grows out of that, meaning I think it was intended initially as a hobby for adults.

It's the brainchild of Gary Gygax, who's famous for this mostly.

There are a couple of other people that found this company TSR in 1973.

And their idea is basically, what if we do a kind of tactical game that kind of detaches from this kind of map and terrain aspect, even though there still are maps, but that mostly happens in everyone's imagination.

And then the way a role-playing game normally will work is that one person is, and this depends on which game you're playing, but it's called the dungeon master famously in DD.

Other systems referred to as the storyteller or the game master.

Someone has to kind of mind the world.

Someone has to kind of present what these individual players and their characters are encountering.

And then everyone else at the table embodies one character, right?

And so in a typical D ⁇ D game, that'll be the sort of a Lord of the Rings type adventure where someone's the elf, someone is a dwarven fighter.

And part of the fun is that you're pretty open-ended in what you do and that role-playing is sort of part of the experience.

That is to say that if one person is playing the elf and the other person's playing a dwarven warrior, you know, you can have a reparte.

You can decide that they have an animosity or a deep friendship and have that inflect how you play the game.

So, it's kind of a mix between a tactical game and kind of collaborative storytelling, really.

Yeah, and kind of like improv as well, maybe.

Yeah, there it can be.

Certainly, you know, as you can imagine, you can accentuate this any which way.

That is to say, there are people who play this like a big board game and move figures around on a map and roll dice.

And then there are others who barely even look at dice and where, you know, if someone says, like, I want to convince a city guard that they should let us in without paying customs or whatever, right?

Like, you could have a dungeon master who says, like, okay, roll a die.

We'll find out whether you, that this worked.

Or a dungeon master who says, okay, lay it on me.

What do you say?

How do you do it?

And then says, okay, that's pretty good.

That's pretty persuasive, right?

It's a type of game that really, on the one hand, really allows for very many different play styles.

It's the kind of game where you have to talk about, and again, like an improv exercise, like where you have to decide ahead of time, like, how are we going to do this?

How are we going to play it?

And the other thing is, it can grow with you.

People return to these games.

There are people I play with who are in their 50s and they've been playing since they were teens.

And I'm sure they're not playing the same game.

I'm sure they're not playing it the same way.

But precisely because you can modulate exactly how this game is going to work, people can come back to it and have totally different experiences, you know, years or even decades apart.

Yeah, I love that.

And I guess, you know, for full disclosure on my background, I have played DD a couple times with friends and I enjoyed parts of it and also just, I think, have like the wrong attention span for games.

Like, there are not that many games I play consistently in my life when I had like a brief and intense clue phase.

But a lot of the time, it's like the explaining of the rules and the explaining of the structure just goes on for so long at the start.

I'm like, I can't do this.

But I feel like there's something so appealing and I can at the same time see maybe the seeds of why certain people would freak out about this of having a game not necessarily as a means to somebody winning and somebody losing, but to sort of...

you know, to really have a huge amount of imaginative world building.

Oh, yeah.

It would seem.

Because like you have to create characters and then you have to make a place for them to exist in.

Absolutely.

And I mean, I think you're already hitting on two key points here.

I think one is the game is extremely long.

It's potentially endless.

Yeah.

And it is something that is hard to do casually.

I think you get sucked in pretty badly once you really get a taste for it.

For the very simple reason that

part of the fun is collectively telling a story as a group over weeks and sometimes years.

I had a D ⁇ D game that ran for a year and a half until we decided, okay, I think the story is now over.

Every week we'd meet and keep playing and the group then just met the next week and started a new story, basically.

The other thing that I think D ⁇ D is famous for and that often it turns people off, let's say, is that the rule books are just enormous, right?

Like, so this experience, let's say for a parent of a child playing this game, is they buy all this stuff, they're surrounded by these thick folianths of rules that I can't make heads or tails of, and then they like mumble to each other and talk for hours and hours in our sweat-smelly basement, right?

And like, I don't even understand what they're doing, right?

And sometimes they're very happy, sometimes they're very upset.

I don't understand what they're doing.

So, it has this kind of impenetrability.

And of course, it also, even during its heyday, had a kind of social stigma.

It's usually not for people at the very top of the social picking order.

And obviously, logging a 300-page rule book and a 20-sided die across a schoolyard is not like the number one way to avoid bullying, right?

So, I think that it has this, it has this real,

you nichify yourself by playing these games.

You're not, at least you didn't used to be sort of someone who made a lot of connections.

It's rather you found the other freaks who loved this stuff and sat down with them.

Right.

I don't know.

It feels like culturally as well, because like adults respond to peer pressure too, it turns out.

Yeah.

Like it feels like the kind of child that people are pressured to want to have is like, impossible.

It's the impossible child, Penrose's impossible child, where it's like perfectly rule-abiding, not rebellious, but also not a nerd or anything.

And it's like, well, I don't even, are we talking about a budding serial killer or what?

Right.

Exactly.

And I mean, cynically, you could say this was the panic that eventually set in over fantasy role-playing games was the way to like make sure you worried about every fucking kid in America, right?

Like, like, it's like, oh, does your kid do drugs?

No, he sits in our basement.

Right.

Oh, does he not read?

Oh, no, he reads all the time.

But is he reading too much or the wrong things?

Yeah, exactly.

It is a wrong kind of reading, exactly, right?

It's so weird.

So like, cynically, you could say, like, yeah, they just sort of figured out how to freak out about even the most sort of non-threatening kids in America.

Right.

And it's like, wow, imagine reading a thick book about ancient times and epic battles.

I know.

Sounds non-Christian to me.

I mean, come on.

I'm sorry.

Like, I think you're just raising a nerd, man.

Like, there is a kind of anxiety that attaches to the way children play in general but there is also kind of like a way in which american capitalism kind of starts sort of realizing hey we can actually get kids to buy a whole lot more games if we tell them hey your parents are gonna hate this shit right and that definitely was true of dnd right like you know we're gonna talk a little bit about this incredible panic that grew up around the game we're gonna talk about the fact that like they really felt themselves to be under assault, the people who made this game.

On the other hand, while all that is true, I'd invite your listeners to think about the fact that they are printing money at the same time.

Like, it's the ultimate Streisand effect, right?

Like, because it's like, this is the game parents hate.

And, like, every 15-year-old is like, say no more.

Take my $20, you know?

Yeah, and I'm sure that it, you know, that it has some scary ramifications, but also, yeah, that it is incredible free advertising.

And, like, we are still advertising it because it's not just,

I mean, I'm sure that this did spill over into other games, but like, we all know that Dungeons and dragons is the satanic panic game right i'm gonna start a panic about clue that's right teaching kids to commit murder

well i wonder where does the panic part of the story start is this like does it come from many directions or does is there kind of like a central figure in all this who kind of gets it rolling.

So I do think it starts with James Dallas Egbert III.

I think there are earlier cases, but this is sort of really the one where it captures the imagination.

So maybe I'll give you just a little bit of a timeline.

So TSR is founded in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1973.

It's basically in Gary Gygax's basement, I think.

I think the building today is a DD Museum, in fact.

So the first edition of DD, I think, is 74, and it's something like a thousand copies, and it sells out immediately.

In 1977, they release Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which sort of like, I think, super kickstarts this.

And then in 1979.

Theoretical Dungeons and Dragons.

I know.

It's like, well, I mean, it gave a wonderful community episode its title, so there's that.

But it gives you kind of a sense of just how quickly this explodes.

Like, there's two different versions of this game suddenly.

And it's selling just like hotcakes.

I mean, it's, I don't know the exact numbers, but.

Yeah, but it's kind of like any other toy or game idea that hits.

It's like it doesn't exist, and then suddenly every child has one of those slap bracelets.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

It does extremely well above all on college campuses that it really makes its first splash.

Yeah.

It seems like a great thing to like stay up all night playing, you know?

I know, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it's probably appropriate then that I think that the real panic sort of kicks off at a university campus, Michigan State University,

where in August of 1979, I believe, James Dallas Egbert III disappears.

And there's a private investigator, Bill Deere, who's brought in to find him.

And there is a suspicion that he disappeared into the steam tunnels underneath the school.

It's also often thought of the steam tunnel incident.

And Deere sort of floats to the media this theory, which I don't think he originates.

Like there are other people who've suggested this, that Egbert might have headed into the tunnels in order to kind of do what we today would call a LARP, a live action role-playing around his D ⁇ D campaign or whatever.

Why he would go there by himself with a game that is almost always played in groups, I don't know, but that's the suggestion.

There's a whole bunch of things that are interesting about James Dallas Egbert, but sort of the media fixates on the fact that he's this avid D ⁇ D player.

He's a 16-year-old.

He's just absolutely brilliant.

Graduated high school at 13, started college at 14, right?

Which also gets at this point you were making earlier that like he's the kind of kid you want and now he's missing, right?

And like, so like all the pieces are here for you to get to worry about the kids who are not smoking dope.

Well, it turns out he was also smoking dope, but like they did not know that then.

Kids contain multitudes.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a college campus in 79.

I mean, come on.

So eventually, Egbert is found.

He calls Bill Deere and says, like, hey, can you come pick me up?

Bill Deere is like, thank God.

I was about to find you, by the way.

I know, I know, right.

Like, he writes this entire book about his genius moves.

And he gets a call from the guy he's finding.

I'm like, I don't know, man.

That feels like he caught a lucky break there.

Call off the day early and hit the links at that point.

Yeah.

I know, right?

But so the story, importantly, Deere kind of never says that much about the case right after it's resolved.

And I should say, unfortunately, and there's a trigger warning here for folks.

James Dallas Egbert III dies in August 1980 by suicide.

He goes back to his home in Dayton, Ohio, and shoots himself there.

And so basically, this sort of is associated in the popular imagination, steam tunnels, suicide, DD, it all sort of gets bunched together.

And until 1984, when Deere writes his book, he sort of never disputes this, right?

He heavily milked the DD angle while working the case.

And yet, if you read the book a little against the grain, or not even that against the grain, it's pretty clear that part of the reason why Egbert had been so hard to find is that he didn't want to be found.

He was scared of all the publicity.

He apparently had been just hanging out in Lansing, switching houses, crashing with, well, older men, probably gay men, right?

Who didn't want to be tangled up with this kind of case to begin with, right?

Yeah.

And so basically, Deere kind of keeps the homosexuality angle and the drug angle out of the coverage mostly.

And that means D ⁇ D.

It's all about D and D, right?

Right.

And that has to stand in for everything else in a way, right?

Exactly, right?

Like, I mean, like, it turns out there were things about James Dallas Egbert that his parents didn't know.

Yeah.

But D ⁇ D was only the half of it, right?

Like it really had to do with other things that are very tragic and tell us a lot about the sort of late 70s.

But

the game was really ancillary to that, it seems.

And even when he releases the book in 1984, he calls it the Dungeon Master, right?

Like he plays up the D ⁇ D angle, right?

Like the letter that they send out to publicists are all about, like, here are some press clippings from the time about D ⁇ D and about rumors of witch cults, drug rings, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like, and then if you read the book, he's like, yeah, no, that kind of wasn't it.

Yeah.

But any publisher, I'm sure, is going to say there's no book in How I Found a Troubled Kid Who Happened to Also Play Dungeons and Dragons.

You know, you have to make it this other story.

Exactly, right?

I mean, not that, you know, we have to blame deer exclusively here because by 1981, you have also the amazing novel Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, an absolute stone cold classic of the genre.

It's also, like, Rona Jaffe wrote one of the classic New York career girl novels, The Best of Everything, and it's so

delightful to me that she, I don't know, these are two very, would seem to be two very different genres, and yet, you know, she did it.

She's like Isaac Asimov.

Yeah.

Well, allegedly, she wrote the book really, really fast, which like having reread it really, really fast over the last weekend, like I would definitely believe.

It's like how Ray Parker Jr.

wrote Ghostbusters in like half an hour.

You're like,

yes, I believe that.

Yeah.

It's like, checks out.

So, and just to give you a sense of like how this notoriety sort of like is interacting with DD's success.

So the same year the novel comes out, TSR Hobbies has, according to Wikipedia, revenues of 12.9 million and 130 people on payroll.

Like that's, it's a juggernaut, right?

And then we get a get a TV movie, movie of the week on CBS in 1982 called Mazes and Monsters.

Pretty faithful to the book, starring the one and only Tom.

Tom Hanks.

Yeah.

Have you seen this thing?

Have you seen this thing?

I have watched it.

Yeah.

I watched it with my friend Jenna a few years ago and I remember being very charmed by it.

Yeah.

And in Mazes and Monsters we have this quartet of college friends and I feel like one of them is kind of modeled on James Dallas Egbert.

Like he's young to be in college.

He seems you know, a little bit more troubled.

And then it's a big twist because Tom Hanks is the one who confuses dungeons and dragons with reality.

Exactly.

And you're like, I did not see that coming.

Yeah, it's an odd one, I think.

Like, as far as moral panic movies go, it's not actually that panicky, right?

Like, there's no sort of seducer who's like, there's no Satan in it.

Yeah, it's like, hey, kids, want to try some D ⁇ D, right?

Like, there's none of that.

Oh, my God.

It's basically just a bunch of damaged youngsters more or less sort of unraveling together.

Like you'll find in any college.

Yeah.

Because that's what college is.

It's where you recover from the trauma of whatever you dealt with at home, partly.

Right.

It just doesn't seem like getting stuck in a game is, it doesn't come up very much, you know?

Or it's like, if it does, then like, it's not because of the game.

Right.

You know, and this idea that a game is powerful enough to break your brain.

Like, I don't know, it feels like this very, like, the way I thought about horror movies when I was a kid, where like on some level, I thought that if I watched The Exorcist, I could die.

Yeah, I mean, it's, I feel like Mazes and Monsters is trying to be a drug movie.

Oh, yeah, totally.

Wow.

Yeah.

For a movie of the week premise, it's pretty good.

But then when it gets more political, you're like, oh, no.

Yeah.

It sort of makes its way into the mainstream.

I mean, I would say CBS Movie of the Week is pretty mainstream.

It gets sort of mixed in there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know, a lot of people watched those.

Like, I realize that TV movies now are the sort of, you know, they feel kind of distant and we watch them and they feel like, I mean, sometimes they can feel like they have very little cultural legacy because

some were big and some weren't.

But, like, the ones that hit it big, like, really hit it.

And I mean, this is one that people know and remember to some extent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if for no other reason than it was, I think Tom Hanks' first starring role or first role, maybe even.

Ah, yeah.

Loved 80s Tom Hanks.

Yeah.

And then the second thing that's important to note here is that the year that Maze of the Monsters, the movie, comes out, is also the suicide of Irving Pulling.

And Pat Pulling, his mother, will sort of start this kind of explicitly Christian crusade against DD.

This is the group with the amazing acronym BAD, B-A-D-D.

I love it.

Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons founded in 1983, I believe.

They're bad, they're bad, they're really, really bad.

Yeah, and the same year, again, like that Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons starts, it's also when the famous DD Saturday morning cartoon debuts on CBS, right?

What?

Oh my god, I forgot this hat.

Aww, yes,

nice, yeah.

And unlike the recent D and D movie starring Chris Pine, this one like actually thematizes the gaming situation, right?

Like the D and D movie, if you saw it, like is just a D and D adventure.

This is really like there is a Dungeon Master, I think, and there are sort of like teens being pulled into a fantasy world, et cetera, et cetera.

So it actually is like really about the gaming situation.

So it's this funny thing where like the criticism and the cultural dominance of this phenomenon sort of are moving apace.

There's no lag there.

They just happen at the same time.

Wow.

And I just forgot that it was a Saturday morning cartoon at any point.

That's pretty great.

Yeah.

What's a little bit more unique is I believe in 1984,

you get the first novels put out by random house through the TSR imprint.

So that's when you can start reading D ⁇ D novels.

And that becomes a big, big thing throughout, I think, the 80s and 90s.

And it is a fun fact how I learned English.

That's so cool.

Yeah, they're quite readable, it turns out.

You know, they're not, I mean, some of them are quite good, but many of them use a, let's say, somewhat more limited vocabulary.

It was perfect for someone just starting out.

I read, there were clue books that I read, and in retrospect, I'm like, how could you even ring a book out of me?

I know.

There were a bunch of them.

At the start of every single one, Mr.

Body will be like, hello, I'm alive.

I don't know why we thought I was dead last time, but I am alive.

And then they'd be like, oh my God, he's been murdered.

Let's look for clues.

At least one clue.

We must have at least one clue.

Like, I mean, I sort of talked earlier about, like, oh, well, you know, walking into a DD game can be a little baffling.

Like, I do wonder how many parents really walked into DD games at all because it's hard to schedule one of these things.

Like, it really, yeah, I can see why people in college are able to do it because, like, you know, they got fuck all to do.

Yeah, that's the time when you do things that you need to get nine people together for.

I know, and you know where everyone lives, you can just knock on their door.

Yeah.

In middle school, like me and my friends like played very little.

What we did was we read collectively, right?

We drew up characters, we made maps, we

generated, you know, adventures, we read the novels and talked about them, right?

Like ultimately, this wasn't so much like us playing an inscrutable game.

It was far more scrutable than that.

It was just a bunch of kids reading a bunch of shit and everyone being like, oh no!

Yeah.

Well, and I feel like there's like an element of this of just like kids like being into something.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I feel like there's a, to some degree, it's like nature abhors a vacuum.

Like kids want to have big enthusiasms about stuff.

Yeah.

And I think that as the hobby has aged too, like I think that some of these things have changed.

We can talk about like what ultimately, because the Satanic Panic did not do in TSR.

TSR sort of died in the most hilarious way possible sort of of its own success.

Yeah, that'll happen.

But there is this kind of like in 1984 or 85 or maybe even 1990 if you walked into a game store the first thing you would have been struck by would have been this like how many options there were and how many ways to play D and D.

There was a kind of part of what it was selling you was the infinity of time.

Like you're young, you have all the time in the world.

Why not buy this and try that too?

Yeah.

Right.

And like anyone actually trying to do any of these things and realize them at the game table would have, I think, found that they had overbought horribly.

But like, that was not the point.

The point was this kind of limitlessness.

And I think in that way, it is like the measurelessness of childhood reading, the way that

people can consume just intense numbers of formulaically written YA novels in a row, right?

This is what this is.

Part of the fun is like the fact that you hope you could do it forever.

How old were you when you first discovered D ⁇ D?

And I'm, you know, aside from that, like, what else drew you to it?

What did you love about it?

Or what do you continue to love?

I think I was eight or nine, I would say, would be my guess.

Although, you know, before we got the first game to the table, I probably was 10.

And I think that's part of what drew me to it.

It was not for everyone.

It was weird.

It didn't involve, you'd have to be physical.

It involved intense kind of bonding.

Sharing that with other people, like spending that much time with other people is a fun thing.

Yeah.

But it felt different from like team sports or whatever.

It's interesting too to look at it as like an adult panic over children bonding in a way that isn't about them relying on each other's physical abilities.

Yeah.

It's like, we got to just accept that that's not going to work for all kids, you know?

Yeah.

It's noticeable, right?

Like the question of sexuality sort of threads through a lot of this early stuff.

And like, yeah, and I was a gay kid in the 1980s.

Like, I think I'm not the only one who basically, I think, gravitated towards the make-believe side of things.

I think that there's a connection there.

And I think parents probably accurately sensed that, that, like, the kid that was withdrawing from them for the game might be withdrawing from them in other ways.

But they didn't, you know, draw the obvious conclusion of being like, hey, let's sit down.

Is there something you want to talk to us about?

They instead were like, oh, no, it's got to be the Satanists or whatever.

Right.

Well, and something I was thinking about in terms of like the satanic panic then and now, you know, in the 80s, you had this more bipartisan panic where what we have today is very politicized.

It's very based on conspiracy theories that are based specifically on supporting and protecting the agenda of the far right.

But at the time, it was trying to be Santa's bag and have something for every fear in a way, whether you were secular or religious or conservative or liberal.

And now it's like we are saying out loud, you know, we're not just going to blame Satan generally.

Like we are being very clear in aligning Satan with like your child having a queer teacher or like your child ever hearing about anything to do with anything, you know, gender, queerness, gayness, any of it.

That's satanic.

And I think that that was the undercurrent in the 80s, the undertow of the whole thing, but people weren't saying it out loud the way that they are now, I think.

I think that's right.

Or, you know, it was more normal to just be incredibly homophobic in a mainstream cultural way.

So I guess people were saying it out loud, but not as part of a conspiracy theory, just as part of daily daily life yeah so i don't know if that's an improvement

well i mean certainly what it was was maybe a fear that parents had that they knew they no longer could voice as starkly as maybe they could have 20 years prior right and like and i think this is a way to like right to have a concern without having to admit what your concern might be right yeah you're like i don't want to have one of those tabletop role-playing game type kids if you know what i'm saying yeah yeah a little a little light in the D20.

Yeah.

In the Christian Rite freak out about D and D, right?

Homosexuality is still part of the litany, right?

Like it involves Satanism, bestiality, homosexuality, et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like, so that is still part of their pitch.

But it's true that

when 60 Minutes sits down with these supposed experts, that's nowhere to be seen.

So you're right, that there is a, like, that's still percolating sort of in the background, but like people know better than to like lead with it.

This could make your kids gay.

Like, that's, that's in there, but like

people are too smart to sort of say that out loud.

Right.

And then that can be sort of the more acceptable face of the fear that you can then sort of slip whatever else you want into like, you know, stuffing a turkey.

Yeah.

So in 1984, you also get the murder of Mary, I think it's pronounced Toey or Tui by Darren Molitor and Missouri.

And Molitor introduces basically a diminished capacity defense because he had been an avid D and D player.

Okay.

Right.

You know, if I'm a lawyer in 1984, I got to grasp whatever straws I can lay hold to.

Yeah.

You're like, I just saw this movie with Tom Hanks.

This is perfect.

You're like, honey, I'm out of ideas.

Let's do the Hanks defense.

They were initially going to go with the big defense, and then they're like, no, I think that the D ⁇ D defense is better.

D ⁇ D defense is better.

And he presents two expert witnesses at trial, Pat Polling and this guy, Thomas Radecki, who is sort of part of the bothered about DD crowd as well.

And he writes this like long essay, Darren Molotor, that is, full of Bible quotes explaining basically how the game took hold of his mind.

And so I think that kind of

kickstarts the whole thing.

In 1985, we get that 60 Minutes report, which basically is all about Pat Polling.

Like, she's both the expert and the concerned parent that Bill Whitaker mostly interacts with.

Yeah, so she really is key in kind of like pushing this kind of concerned about TV violence script onto this game that like, you know, does contain some violence and has some violent imagery on its covers, but like is ultimately right, like tame compared to it's a pretty violent culture, you know?

I mean, parents who were raising kids in the 80s probably grew up watching westerns, you know, which I realize are in the mid-century were kind of less gory than the kind of thing we have now.

But you could also make the argument that that shows kids that you can get shot and kind of recover from it easily and you know not suffer too badly by falling off a horse or having some kind of head injury.

So there's,

yeah, singling out Dungeons and Dragons as the most violent component of American society is a bit rich.

Right.

So Pulling very much is sort of, as I say, drawing on the sort of TV violence sort of template in her campaign.

But she also does something that I know you know quite well from the satanic panic.

She starts going to police departments.

And that's where we start getting just like a bunch of false positives.

Basically, it's this very strange kind of vicious cycle that the kind of Satanism crusaders and cops sort of entered in the mid-80s, where basically they receive training.

And then like every time someone does something violent, they're like, oh, could there be a dungeon master's guide somewhere within 20 yards of this person, right?

And it's like, maybe, but it's not the first thing I'd look at.

Yeah, exactly.

Just to give you one example, in 1985, there's the case of James Allen Kirby, which is basically sort of a proto-Columbine-style shooting in Kansas.

And like, in hindsight, it seems that the DD played very little role in this at all, but like the police kind of reported every time.

This is the thing from the seminar with that nice lady, right?

So this is a very, very, very common thing.

It sort of enters into kind of like the criminal justice discourse, basically.

Right.

Yeah.

And I find it so fascinating, the whole cult cop circuit, where you have this sort of fascinating kind of circle jerk, I guess is the correct term for it, where you have, you know, cops going around the country, you know, and other kind of interested people like Pat Pulling giving presentations to local police departments.

Or, you know, if you look at newspapers from the 80s, there will often be like coming up at the community center, learning to recognize Satanism.

Right.

And like give these talks around the U.S.

and, you know, starting to spill into other countries eventually.

But you just get this sort of network of cops talking to other cops, all sharing the same handful of stories, but them sort of circulating so much that it feels like more than it is, which is essentially how schoolyard rumors happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, and they're kind of acting like the very children they claim to be so concerned about.

But they have guns.

Yeah.

And, and.

they then keep getting interviewed, right?

And so like.

Yeah.

And then it's on TV.

And as a civilian, you're like, like it has to be a problem the cops are talking about it and it's on tv because the more you hear about something the more real you feel it is like i feel like everyone is drinking espresso martinis without me and that can't be true right

Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things happening here, right?

On the one hand, you get these kind of the Christian right, which is also, I think, sort of starting to make inroads into school boards, et cetera, et cetera.

So like a lot of these ideas sort of are starting to enter the mainstream and they need kind of good stalking horses and D and D is a better one than some other other things that parents might have more of an idea about.

Then it's also, I think, it's this weird connection to law enforcement, which sort of produces its own kind of, well, not quite false positives, but its own positives.

Right?

Pat Polling will at some point sort of claim that, like, in the last 10 years, whenever she says this, I think in 88 or 89, there have been over 100 cases of murder or suicide where DD played a role.

What she means is that someone found DD paraphernalia near,

not on the person, but like in the possession of of the person doing the thing, right?

Right.

And I mean, this is at a time when there's three to four million kids playing D ⁇ D across the United States, right?

So you're going to get these kinds of numbers, right?

Like you're going to get some numbers.

Some kids out of those three to four million are going to harm themselves or others.

Right.

Like any culture that has that scale of saturation of society, you can find all kinds of data points and act like they're connected.

I realize this is like on a bigger scale, but it's like saying that people committed murder because they had listened to Taylor Swift at some point.

Like there are probably people

who have committed murders recently who had listened to Taylor Swift at some time

before the murder.

But like are those related phenomena?

You know, probably not.

I realize some people really hate Taylor Swift and would get excited about that idea, but yeah.

Well, the other thing to think about, of course, is that like the Satanism or cult angle, as you were pointing out, kind of becomes necessary to kind of keep this whole thing going.

Right, it's kind of thin.

That's the thing, like, once you think about it as a hobby, it's like, well, yeah, I mean, like, this kid may have once owned a player handbook and they may not have played for like three years, but that's not how they treat it.

It's basically the logic of the drug narrative where it is only down, down, down, down, down, right?

Which is like a very 80s narrative, right?

The idea that like someone might enjoy playing a campaign, then decide it's lame, or move house, or join a sports team or whatever right like yeah that doesn't occur to people that like just because you have at some point had a hobby doesn't you are not then like fully defined by that hobby it only works if you don't think of it as a hobby you do think of it as this kind of like yeah like a drug or like a cult like you will get sucked in further and further which i'm sure there are people who you know like myself who got really into it but like i can tell you that like we lost players constantly and they probably had the books lying around somewhere they probably had their character character sheets somewhere they probably didn't sell their dice but like if they did something like i don't know how associated they were with dnd

it also did become a way and i think this is why sort of the broader media cared a way to problematize the one set of kids that one wasn't freaking out for other things about right yes so here's a list from pat pulling's book oh boy the devil's web which comes out in 89 it's a good title great title a profile of participants so these are a lot of materials that she used in her seminars she would give for law enforcement, and she draws a lot on stories she's being told by law enforcement in those seminars.

Profile of participants.

First, usually very intelligent.

Two, creative.

Three, ninety-five percent of the players are male, with the majority being Caucasian.

Four, imaginative, adventurous.

Five, academically interested in history or computer science with a high math aptitude and or an interest in drama.

Six, physically either fairly slight build, clean-cut, or possibly overweight and and sloppy appearance.

This is a gay panic.

Right?

They're like, we're going after the creative children now.

I know.

It's like, leave the drama kids alone, dude.

Seven, usually socioeconomically from a middle to upper class, middle class family, right?

So like this is, we're covering the people that like, you couldn't do like teenage truancy or, you know, heavy metal, whatever.

Like they don't have tattoos.

Yeah.

So you can't do the whole Satanism thing.

You're right.

It's like a big tent that all the indoor kids fit in or something, or all the kids that you don't have like an excuse to be stressed about generally.

Yeah, exactly.

It gets even better.

Eight, generally, the adolescent DD player is not involved with drugs.

Cool.

Is your child taking drugs?

If they're not, they could be playing DD.

So you better give them some drugs.

Yeah.

Nine, adolescents who become heavily involved generally are, quote, good kids with no prior behavioral problems.

What are the signs?

Well, if they have no prior behavioral problems, that is a red flag.

Yeah, exactly.

It's huge red flag.

The lack of red flag is a huge red flag.

Man.

I mean, there is like a side to this where you could say like, okay, so like for, as a counterexample, in like early literature, especially about anorexia and eating disorders in the 70s, there is, and I'm thinking especially of the golden cage, this sort of sense of puzzlement initially by a lot of people writing about about this, you know, from some kind of clinical perspective of it's interesting that like the really good, obedient kids, the successful kids, the type A kids, are the ones who are presenting with severe eating disorders.

And again, I think the Golden Cage makes this argument.

It's like, yeah, the thing that seems like a sign not to worry is actually a reason to worry because you've raised a child who,

you know, doesn't feel like they're able to express discomfort or, you know, to feel autonomy, perhaps.

If there are no signs of trouble, and if there seem to be no signs of trouble based on the fact that they have adapted so perfectly to the standards that you've created for them, then like, what could be under the surface?

But that's a very different question than like,

how do we pathologize

a kid just sort of existing?

Yeah, yeah.

I think that in the end, what made this catch on was simply that, and maybe this is like too much armchair sociology, but like, this is the latchkey generation.

Like, Right.

This is Gen X.

I think the idea that parents just, there were more parts of children's lives that were inaccessible to their parents.

Right.

Right.

And that businesses, including TSR, were moving into the gap that was opening up.

I think that that's fair, right?

Like, you know, in a way, it was capitalism all along, but like...

Yeah.

It's fair to be worried about a corporation parenting for you.

It's just, yeah, there are a few others in line in front of Gary Geygax's.

Yeah.

Gegasses of the world, yes.

Yeah, it's like a fear of like your kids might be reading.

I mean, like you get some version of this, right?

Like this joke in Stranger Things, right?

Where like the parents think their kids are playing D ⁇ D and the kids are like saving the world, right?

Like, and like the absolute inability to like understand any of what's going on under their roof, like that's getting at something.

And of course, you know, in a lot of the rumpus rooms in which the kids around 13, 14 started playing D and D, they eventually like would get high, you know,

when they were 17 or 18.

So like, it does live in that kind of space where parental supervision sort of starts slackening.

And I think that is what made this kind of spark fly over.

Why, you know, people who like you manifestly should not listen to, like Pat Pulling, could get the ear of the good folks at 60 Minutes, right?

And like have them kind of like take this pretty seriously.

Yeah.

Well, and Pat Pulling, I feel like, is to me such an interesting figure within the satanic panic generally, because you have somebody who had you know a teenager who died by suicide yeah which is one of the worst things i can imagine you know i guess in terms of personal grief and absolutely am you have the way that people are going to behave especially in extreme emotional circumstances especially when they're dealing with grief and especially over the loss of a child yeah and like i do not hold those people to the kind of standard that i hold 60 minutes to yeah you know yeah And when you grieve, like you often really want a quest.

Like I really identify with that experience of like, it is better to just focus on a crusade or a quest for revenge than to have to just go straight into it.

And similar to Michelle Remembers, actually, a case of like people, I think, like not having a cynical bone in their body, but just happening to drop a match on a room full of perfectly crispy hay.

What are your thoughts about her having, you know, kind of dove into this particular part of the panic lately?

Yeah, so I mean, it's definitely, it's deeply tragic, and it's very clear that she's kind of trying to give a name to the feeling that she didn't know her son as well as she thought she did.

And I mean, as a parent myself, I find that that seems deeply tragic to me.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things that you hear from a lot of the parents who are quoted in these kinds of pieces and these kinds of reports is that they had never even heard of Dungeons and Dragons before their child died.

I mean, there's two ways of reading that.

Like either the kids are being so secretive, or

you can read it as saying, well, maybe it wasn't that important to them.

They just happened to own this game.

Or we could say, well, maybe that was, it's just a parse pro toto for like a bunch of stuff that like, yeah, this kid was developing an inner life and you weren't part of that or you maybe they didn't feel they could involve you with that.

Like again, given that several, I don't know about Pat Pulling's son, but a lot of these kids also turned out to be gay.

So like, you know, the fact that like they contained an entire cosmos that they couldn't share with their parents, like that's a horrible thing to find out.

And I think DND is the name that they ended up giving that.

But as you say, like there is, because you were mentioning the responsibility of the media.

And like, I think there's one exchange from the 60 Minutes documentary.

And I'll just read it to you.

So this is Bill Whitaker doing a voiceover.

until that night.

They'd never even heard of the game Dungeons and Dragons.

And you get a voiceover from Pat Pullings saying a curse that he had received in the game that day basically set him over the edge.

And then you get a voiceover from Bill Whitaker again: the curse that was placed on Binks's DD character that day, right?

So, like, he takes what she's saying, she's saying, My son was cursed, yeah, right, and he takes that, right?

Yeah, and it's like, oh, this was a, he couldn't understand what was happening, he mistook a in-game curse for real right no so is she right like not only are you putting a grieving parent on tv yeah you're also like trying to reframe what is obviously kind of a loss of reality yeah right because grief is really the trip that makes you lose touch with reality for a while or one of them yeah and then you reframe it into this kind of like concern trolly thing like that's not what she's saying she's saying yeah he was cursed someone placed an actual curse curse on him.

And this is something she believed in.

And that may be a good argument for maybe not platforming her on 60 Minutes, but definitely then don't go out and turn it into this kind of like, oh, can kids not tell fiction from reality?

It's like your supposed experts can't, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, speaking of like the United States of projection,

this is, you know, on some level, adults accusing teenagers and kids of having the same problems they have so that they can feel

maybe a little bit more in control.

I'm not just thinking about Pat Pulling here, but yeah, that we have adults having this basic existential debate over what is real and then accusing their kids of that in a way.

Yeah, and I mean, there's also, of course, the old just worry about who's teaching your children, right?

Like the Devil's Web's subtitle is Who's Stalking Your Children for Satan?

Pat Pulling, too, in that 60 Minutes piece, I remember, says something like, it's not make-believe.

There is no game board.

It is role-playing, which is normally used for behavior modification.

What?

This idea that this is actually, role-playing is usually used for behavior modification.

I think they're thinking about something like cognitive behavioral therapy or something like that.

But like, this idea that like, oh, they're learning these kinds of patterns of behavior, right?

To me, like, there's a kind of a residual sort of anti-communist imagination there, right?

Like,

but there is also like, my kids behaving in ways that I don't recognize, right?

Like, it's like, you know, someone must be modifying their behavior behavior because they were such a sweet kid, right?

Like, it's just, there's a lot of mid-80s cope in what is admittedly a horribly tragic, tragic story.

You know, it kind of fits with the whole American concept of quote-unquote victims' rights, which is that for any political agenda or inflammatory media story, you can probably find somebody in the United States who has experienced a personal tragedy that would seem to support your point if only it were not one single data point that you were framing misleadingly.

Right.

The other expert quoted in the 60 Minutes is Thomas Verdecki, who's sort of a, well, he claims to be from the University of Illinois Medical School.

That turned out not to be the case.

He's sort of big into television violence.

He, I think, led the National Coalition on Television Violence and the International Coalition Against Violent Entertainment.

And he claims that there are like 28 deaths related to DD in the last five years as of 1985.

So 1980 to 85.

You know, again, like that seems, as the game designer Michael Stackpole will point out in a report on Radeki and polling in 1989, like it would mean that statistically D ⁇ D players are far less likely to do any of these things than other kids.

Probably just two numbers passing each other in the night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what kind of effect does this have on like people playing D ⁇ D at this time?

You know, are there scary consequences for some of them?

Throughout all of this, I am sure that there were kids who were prohibited from it.

I do believe that there are clubs that were sort of forbidden, etc., etc.

But by and large, the story of DD in the 1980s is one of endless success.

That is to say, the novels, you know, are on bestseller lists.

The books keep selling out.

Again, like the biggest streisand effect ever, right?

Like kids gravitate towards this hobby more than they might have if there hadn't been all this press attention paid to it.

Starting in the late 80s, I think 1988, 1988, you start getting DD video games, which introduce a whole other generation to the world of DD.

Yeah, it really almost doesn't seem to have had much of an effect at all, at least on the bottom line for the company or on the overall success of this hobby.

What ends up undoing TSR is actually the fact that they just keep putting out stuff.

Well, there are a bunch of things that go wrong.

They appear to be not business geniuses, sort of like an interesting through line.

Gary Gygax, in fact, got fired from the company in 1985 after kind of a Hollywood sojourn that appears to have involved just like Starlets and Coke, basically.

Will success spoil Gary Gygax?

I know.

And ultimately, I think that one of the things that undoes the company is this kind of really beautiful thing that I alluded to earlier, which is that they keep producing more settings for the game.

There are more different ways to play.

But of course, the player base ends up fracturing because of it.

That is to say, right, you have to own the player's handbook or the dungeon master's guide if you want to be a dungeon master.

But you can then decide whether you want to play in a more medieval setting or you want to play in a Thousand and One Night setting or you want to play in an Aztec setting or whether you want to play a Celtic campaign or whatever.

And there are DD books for all of this, right?

And it sort of didn't occur to them that like that means that the readership fractures for each of these.

So the very thing they were selling you on, which is like there are infinite ways to play this, right?

And to just give you a sense, like, right, like, let's say you go for the Aztec thing.

That's a box set, 250 pages, three full-color maps, some weird like standees you could use, and maybe like some handouts for players, right?

Like

people can play something like that for six months easily, maybe for a year.

Like I'm guiding my players through a campaign.

I would say it's a 200-page book and we're maybe three months in, right?

And they put out like hundreds of these a year, right?

No one could possibly get through any of it.

And more to the point, of all those millions, three to four million players, only really one out of five, namely the dungeon master, has to own any of this shit.

Oh, wow.

Right.

The other people just buy a $1 die and like show up and are like, cool,

I'm pretty ready.

Right.

And it turns out, it kind of got eaten by capitalism because it's like ultimately a pretty non-capitalist endeavor.

It like, it's a beautiful blaze of glory.

Yeah.

And that's why it's satanic.

And this is something they still struggle with.

TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast who make Magic the Gathering, which in turn was bought by Hasbro, the fine folks at Hasbro.

And they're still struggling with this.

Like, how do we market this object?

We're like, we're like, oh, just use your imagination.

It's like, oh, cool.

So I don't have to buy anything more.

Like, oh, I'm starting to see how the money-making part of this was undercooked by us.

Right.

And I can see why the idea of imagination is threatening for many reasons, right?

And one of them is that if you are raising your child to not question, you know, certain tenets, right?

If you're raising them to be obedient to not just a religion necessarily, but just like the way that you see the world and want them to, which I think is very common in American history is our idea of what parenting is supposed to be.

Then imagination can be threatening because what if they imagine things you don't want them to know about?

Then you kind kind of control is slipping in that way.

But I like even better this window into, like, oh, right, imagination is the worst thing to encourage kids to use because then they won't want to buy stuff as much.

And that would be terrible.

Yeah, the fact that, like, you know, they created these infinite worlds and they were like, oh, people are not sort of coming back up to buy more of our stuff.

I mean, I think things sold well, but like, this was a structural problem.

They taught a man to fish and now he's fishing.

They're like, we got, we may do another fish kit.

And he's like, no, I'm good.

And so is this a case of like American media embarking on this great folly of aligning dungeons and dragons with possible extreme danger to your child.

And then, as with so many other things, like not ever admitting they made a mistake, but just kind of like backing off of it because people don't care as much anymore or like it becomes like its popularity wanes and then it doesn't feel like so much of a threat i think so but although i think there's also unlike the satanic panic i would say

the cost was much less substantial right to people's freedom and livelihood i like that part

then you have the fact that these were corporate entities unlike big daycare and they knew how to fight back right like these these were people who are making money doing this they were not big faceless corporations but like this was their job and they were gonna fight like hell to keep it and so you do have people like michael stackpole and gary gygak sort of out there pushing back sort of trying to explain like why this is bunk and then i think it really helped that like a lot of the people carrying the panic were just such utter cranks and weirdos right and that like you know when you have your television violence guy on 60 minutes being like I heard from parents that saw their child summon a DD demon into his room before he killed himself.

And you're like, okay, that man just claimed to have seen a demon summoning on cbs news does this strike you as particularly serious so i think like that's part of it too that it was just kind of so outlandish that it almost was sort of self-deflating and the fact that like american capitalism in whatever tiny form through companies like tsr and some others like had a stake in this right like it's not true for the satanic panic in general right like this very rarely like only record labels is sort of the only thing i can think of where like where the satanic panic found corporate actors to yell at and these were after a fashion corporate actors and they were gonna push back and they had the ear of media and they had a certain amount of media savvy and they would be like no this is not correct you can wrongfully imprison a daycare worker any day of the week but challenge a profitable cartoon that's much harder yeah and i'm saying that like a joke because it makes me sad i mean one counterfactual i sometimes think about is like what if D

had not become big business, but had been a thing that people, there are game forms out there in the 70s and 80s that are entirely done through mimeographed paper, right?

Like where no one's really making any money.

What if that had been the path that the industry had gone down?

And gee, I wonder whether it would have been far scarier, right?

Because like basically, if it's just a bunch of things kids get up to, like, there's almost no limits to what American law enforcement and American media will call for or try and make happen.

But as you say, like once a profit-making corporation is there and can be like,

I mean, just as simple as, hey, that's kind of sounding defamatory.

Our lawyers might want to explore this, right?

Like, it just puts some very serious limit on the kind of bullshit you can shoot your mouth off over.

And, like, this is, I think, part of the story there.

That, like, I'd like to think of it as this David versus Goliath story, but like, it probably is to some extent a Goliath versus Goliath story.

And if the Goliath, the second Goliath, hadn't been in the room, you know, we might be telling a slightly darker story, I think.

I agree.

And we love to talk about the David and Goliath story as if it's really inspiring, but it's like, kind of, but also like we shouldn't valorize people who knowingly go into situations where they could be crushed very easily.

Like, it's very brave to do that, but generally, people do that because they have to.

And it's not great that they have to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is the most unsurprising, surprise ending that being a business rather than a person is what keeps you safe in the satanic panic.

Let's all incorporate.

Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, like, there's a funny way in which we could argue that like the panic really started with corporatization and IP and ended through it as well, right?

Like, because a question that I don't think I talked about, but that I've thought about before is like part of why people like Pat Poling and Thomas Verdecki are so freaked out about D ⁇ D is that there are demons in the game.

And the question is like, why are there demons in the game?

Much of early DD is basically a Tolkien pastiche with some Fritz Leiber or Conan the Barbarian or something like that thrown in.

But those don't tend to have, as far as I recall, like Christian-style medieval demons, right?

And I think one reason may have been intellectual property.

Right.

Shit.

There's this early book that Gary Gygax puts out, Deities and Demigods, which had stat blocks basically for monsters from the Cthulhu mythos and from Michael Moorcock's work.

And both of those sections were subsequently removed, I'm guessing, because the Lovecraft Estate and Moorcock were like, hey, that's our stuff.

What are you doing?

Right?

Right.

And you can't call something a Bowrog, because that's the Tolkien estate.

Exactly, right?

That's why DD has halflings, not hobbits, right?

So I wonder whether the reason those scary demons were in there in the first place was that they were like, fuck, we can't have the Lovecraft estate mad at us again.

Say what you will about Beelzebub.

You know, he's no one's IP, right?

And so like, that's how it started, probably.

And then, but also, it's, as you say, it's the being corporation and the end save them too.

Yeah.

It is the answer and the, and the, the cause of and the answer to all problems, like beer.

There you go.

I don't know.

I do really love just the idea of like, you know, late night in Lake Geneva.

It's lake night in

anyway.

And, you know, you're burning the midnight oil.

You're like, think, think, think.

What are we going to do?

How are we going to get around this copyright issue?

And then somebody is like, Satan!

Satan is in the public domain.

Or, you know, if not Satan, then like demons, whoever.

And it is

part of the problem of trying to have a conversation about any of this is that you can say that there are references to Satan in culture because that's proof that he's real and he's around.

But also it's like humans create culture and there are characters in culture that persist, you know, in one form or another for centuries or millennia.

And the fact that we

develop folklore isn't, we're telling stories about ourselves, you know, not necessarily about the characters in those stories.

Yeah, it's also this very funny like kind of contagion logic where like basically hearing about something at all, and I think this is where homosexuality and satanic panic sort of all merge, right?

Because that's the sort of the obvious case I should have made earlier, or his point I should have made earlier, is the reason why I mentioned stat blocks for these demons is like you fight them, right?

Like the point is they're the enemy, right?

Like, yes, there are sort of evil demonic rituals on D and D, 99.99999% of the time, you're supposed to stop it.

That's the story, right?

And this idea that like, oh, the kids will get the content independent of how it is being offered to them.

Right.

I think is one that we, I at least in the 80s sort of associate with drugs, right?

There's no such thing as trying it.

And I associate with sexuality, right?

Like, this is how Christian conservatives tend to think about sexuality.

And I think that's the other important point to make here: that, like, basically, the way that Dungeons and Dragons plays with these tropes is as contrast to the white hats, which are the people playing the game, right?

And again, not in every case.

It's a very open-ended game, but like in the vast majority of cases, right?

Like, you're not playing as Sauron, you're playing as Frodo.

I mean, there's a lot of Satan in the Bible.

Like, can you let your kids read the Bible?

They might like love Satan.

I mean, I've always, I read a lot of the Bible as a kid, and that is where I got my sense of Satan as like kind of making a good point from time to time, you know, so you can't stop learning.

Yeah.

I mean, we'd have to ban Milton for sure.

Yeah.

Sure, someone's tried that, but

it also occurs to me that there's something very telling here in this idea of like, because there are things that you shouldn't try, right?

Like, I don't think that I need to try meth.

I don't need to try anything that is highly addictive.

And at this point, even party drugs are often laced with

something that'll kill you.

And that's not fun.

So the list of things you can try at college has gotten smaller, which is terrible.

And it's not the fault of college students.

But the idea of like, what if I try something and I like it and my identity reveals itself to me and then I know who I am and I can't unknow it?

And it's like, well,

yeah, that's very, it sucks to, you know, live in a culture that wants to deny you that because that's not

fair.

That's not control that parents can aspire to have over their children.

And yet a very central part of this seems to be exactly that.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I don't have kids.

I know parenting is really hard, but I guess, you know, don't make it harder than it has to be.

Let your kid be a nerd.

Yeah.

This is my general advice for parents.

If your kid is figuring out who they are, then like, that's exciting, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And on a more pragmatic level, if they can figure out how to make a DD character, they can master turbo attacks.

So you're good.

Ah, I love it.

DD was there all along.

DD will save us.

Unless it is too hard for your brain to focus on, like mine, in which case you can do something else that will worry parents of the 80s.

It's true.

And it is one of those funny things that, like, you know, the, I feel like the 80s really have turned out to be eternal in ways that like, or the late 70s too, that in the way that we're doing the moral panics, but we also still have at least some of the cool hobbies we came up with at the time.

Well, what a journey this has been.

And I guess what have you been up to in DD lately?

Ah, so currently I am running a game, and we're actually not playing DD at all.

We decided after two and a half years to kind of give it a rest, and we're now playing the British role-playing game, Warhammer.

And so, I'm currently doing that.

And then I'm going to be joining a new campaign, I think, in August, hopefully.

I'm very excited for that, too.

I'm excited for all of it.

I'm excited for, I don't know, whatever people are doing lately that brings them joy.

Yeah, thank you so much for this.

Thank you.

Thank you for letting me talk your ear off about Dungeons and Dragons.

It's my favorite thing to give an ear to.

And I know you already told us, but where can people find you if they want a little more of your work?

Yes.

So I have a substack, adriandobb.substack.com.

You can follow my podcasts, The Feminist Present and Embed with the Right.

And I would encourage everyone, if they enjoyed my animate versions about

moral panics, to check out the Cancel Culture Panic, which comes out in September.

I'm very excited for that.

Me too.

I wrote the book initially in German.

This is an English adaptation, not a translation.

So I'm very excited to, after two years of people yelling at me in German, to finally get yelled at in English.

It's a huge, huge,

huge step forward for me.

I'm like, oh, that's nice.

At least it's in English, too.

I wish I knew enough about the German language to make a grammar joke, but I would just make a fool of myself.

But I'm very

so happy for anyone who gets to write a book and be yelled at about it, but especially in two languages.

It's just what a triumph.

I know.

Ah, wow.

We did it.

We're imagining.

We're using the most dangerous tool of all.

Imagination.

And that was our episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for being with us in this long summertime.

Thank you so much to Adrienne Dobb for being our wonderful guest.

Thank you to Taj Easton for editing this episode.

And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode, as always.

And we will see you in two weeks.