NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 8896388" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, man! I mean, for expectation-setting, in the US, a significant portion of the people thought that AD&D in the early '80's was literally instructions for worshiping Satan. That portion was significant enough that in 2022 the most recent episode of Stranger Things could reference it and not really have to justify or explain it. TOM HANKS was in a movie about it. Harry Potter went through it.It would not take very much for someone to decide to use D&D as a prop in some culture war talking point. The general public won't understand the nuances of the OGL vs. "D&D," and bad actors and punditry with axes to grind and people who profit off of moral panics would lap it up.One of the big things you need to consider as a Brand is that there are people out there who are real flies in the ointment, and you're not immune from them. The US has had the Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, fears of backmasking, overblown articles about the dangers of the Tide Pod Challenge, terror about "groomers," armed disruptions of drag queens telling stories to kids, absolute media breathlessness over "rainbow fentanyl," persistent articles cherry-picking data about the rise in crime rates, periodic alarmists shouting about migrant caravans, an ongoing anxiety about cancel culture, nonsense fears about critical race theory and litterboxes in schools. Moral panics are the base air that like a third of this country breathes. D&D is not immune to this, and nerd culture more generally is very vulnerable to this stuff specifically because it's a weird subculture that normies don't always get.A news article like "Your toy company could be selling your child pornography/satanism/woke leftist propaganda/drugs" coming out opening weekend of the D&D movie is absolutely a real risk the D&D brand faces.</blockquote>

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