Welcome to another brand new show from the Bad Boys of Dice, as they talk about the days of dark, the years when it was bad to play D&D out in the open, because you were labeled a “Satanist” or people thought you were dangerous, “The Satanic Panic Years”. It was a time in the ’80s when teens, who were very depressed and not mentally stable, either killed themselves or friends and their parents had nothing to blame… except for D&D! OMG! Listen in as the hosts talk about what happened, the results and also explain how they lived through it.
Links on the show:
Patricia Pulling and her story
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Great topic and great discussion! I’m one of those red box gamer kids from the 1980s. Two things jump to mind when I think of how different D&D culture was in the pre internet 1980s.
1) As a kid (pre driver license) I’d actually read the yellow pages to find places to find D&D modules and books. With a lack of hobby stores around and no ability to drive the top three places to find modules and books in the mid 1980s were: my local Ace Hardware in Round Lake, IL (a dark niche of books and modules next to the snap on models), there was a greenhouse in Antioch, IL with a D&D section nestled in the vestibule connecting two large hot green houses, and there was the rare trip to Walden books in the long bulldozed Lakehurst Mall.
2) In the late 1980s, me and my brothers played D&D and sported heavy metal shirts and were into “cool” things like metal, comic books, and D&D. It was all show, we were good kids goofing off and having fun. But being the 1980s, a neighbor’s mom and my mother got into a conversation one summer day, where she said told my mom that her sons were all budding Satanists and going to hell. That bugged my Mom so much that after few beers, and unbeknownst to us, she took a plastic bottle of weed kill and poured a huge 666 on their front lawn that night.
With in a couple days a gigantic 666 had slowly burned itself into their lawn as the grass died and turned brown. The brand was totally visible all summer. Everybody freaked out, my brothers and I were wrongly blamed anyway, and probably didn’t do D&D any favors either.
Today, I can’t imagine that conversation happening.