Satanic Panic of the late 80's

[dungeonmastermark1]

Satanic Panic.. so my sons friends( 18 yrs old) could not believe gamers went thru this in our country. I had to break out this old piece of history... who else remembers the "dark ages" of gaming ?
I remember my parents were a bit nervous about D&D..but they realized i was just playing a game and having fun..but i was not able to tell anyone at church when i was a kid.
I included the link to the 60 minutes special ( in case anyone has never seen it )

 

[univoxs]

The guys over at Stuff You Should Know podcast did a great episode on the Satanic Panic. I find mass hysteria interesting. Like the dancing plagues in Germany.

The Satanic Panic lingered on for quite some time. I remember getting into Magic: The Gathering in the late 90s and my buddy got his cards taken away by his mom and she gave him Pokemon instead. All because of the implied pentagram on the back of the cards. Lame. And we were already teenagers!

Something good did come out of the whole mess though. There were a lot of good movies and books that only existed because of the Satanic Panic.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

To kids these days, with D&D now considered hip and cool, the Satanic Panic must seem so strange. I count myself very lucky that my parents paid it no mind (though my brief-lived school D&D club didn't survive it).

Looking back at the whole, thing and knowing how important faith was to Gary Gygax, it makes me sad to think of him having to argue against these accusations, again and again.

 

[Sacrosanct]

"You think it's crazy and can't grasp how our society had a Satanic Panic in the 80s? Well, look at some of the crazy stuff people believe right now that I would never think possible..."

 

[staz100]

In the 90s we weren't allowed to play D&D in he gamers club in high school. That's actually how I discovered MtG. We could play that, but not D&D.

 

[Retreater]

This mentality still affects me. I'm hesitant to talk about the hobby outside of my core groups. I'm a little less welcoming to new players because I'm guarded about it.

 

[nevin]

when it hit in the south Con's just stopped having roleplaying games, and a lot of them just stopped happening.

We went from having a combined Origins GenCon in Dallas to almost nothing in the state for at least 15 years. It was nuts in the late 80's. The Southern Baptist convention was teaching it's pastors that D&D was all about worshipping false gods and trying to cast magic spells. I don't think they had read a chapter of the books between them. I had one of my friends drop off all his books at our game and tell me he couldn't hang around with us anymore because his sister was so worried about him going to hell. And as some else mentioned gaming clubs in school became taboo. Down here there was an active angry hateful attempt to end RPG's in general.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

At work the department I'm in had recently absorbed another similar department and we were doing an "introduce yourselves" meeting. When my turn came up, I'll admit, there was a moment of "do I do this or not?" before saying "I'm a big Dungeons & Dragons fan." Granted, I work in IT, so I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one. Also, it was either that or try to explain what sort of music I make (dark ambient, which probably wouldn't mean much to a lot of folks "so, ah, anybody familiar with the Cold Meat Industry record label?").

This mentality still affects me. I'm hesitant to talk about the hobby outside of my core groups. I'm a little less welcoming to new players because I'm guarded about it.

I will say that having lived through all this and seeing D&D become cool is pretty awesome. Also, totally into what Death Saves has done to take the whole Satanic Panic and turn it into their own aesthetic.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

And I am afraid this may happen again, but this time not against D&D, other TTRPGs or videogames but the target will be other, not directly related with franchises of speculative fiction.

 

[Blue Orange]

It's the reason behind the change of devils, daemons, demodands, and demons to baatezu, yugoloths, gehreleths, and tanar'ri in 2e. (That was later changed to make tanar'ri a subset of demon in 3e).