"Role-Playing Games Spawn Cultish Craze"

[Alzrius]

Recently, while doing some reading about the history of tabletop role-playing games, I stumbled across a PDF of an old copy of the Orange Coast Daily Pilot from May of 1981. One of the articles talks about how popular D&D has become in the wake of the Egbert affair just a few years prior. It also includes several quotes from Deanna Sue White, who ran a campaign set in her homebrew world of Mistigar, which remains known today mostly for how a group of players in Dave Hargrave's campaign, calling themselves the Black Lotus Society, planned to infiltrate White's Mistigar campaign and subvert it, a plot that was foiled by White's players.

I've pulled the article and attached it here, in case anyone else feels like looking at this glimpse of our hobby as it was seen from the outside, forty years ago.