Sadly, though it doesn't qualify as a "satanic panic" story, our group recently had a casualty courtesy of the "D&D is evil" narrative.
A few of you may remember a thread I started a few weeks ago talking about how I was going to be GMing a new group composed of my two teenage daughters and a few of their friends. After our second session, one of the young ladies told the group that she could no longer play with us because her parents forbade her, saying "D&D is evil" (a direct, if secondhand, quote).
I offered to call or visit her parents to talk about their concerns, but she doesn't want to rock the boat that way. She also mentioned her parents are quite religious and I am unlikely to change their minds.
I am tempted to tell her to keep playing without telling her parents, just because I know the whole thing is so stupid, but since there's no way I would want anyone, especially another adult, pulling a stunt like that with my own 15-year-old daughter, I'm going to resist.
Anyway, I told her she's welcome back anytime if her parents change their minds. This is so blasted frustrating, not the least because now the group is one short and we need another player. Uuurrrghhhh...
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In a recent event that, while secular, could have been right out of the Satanic Panic, my mother calls me at 10:55 pm and asks if I still play D&D. I replied in the affirmative, and she says I need to stop ans starts going on about how she saws a news piece about these guys who were using pipe bombs to blow something up and that they named the bombs after D&D characters. She say's she's scared because she doesn't want me to be associated with them. There's a couple problems though.
- This event took place in another state on the other side of the country.
- This news piece was an episode of Forensic Files.
- That episode was from from 2009.
- A couple of family issues where she is trying to have power and I'll not say more than that.
-Oh and let us not forget that she used to Play D&D!
Oy vey.
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I started playing in about 1983. I received the red box basic set for Chistmas from my aunt after I told my mom that's what I wanted. My experiences were fairly mild.
Once my mom told me some of her friends had asked about it so she figured she would ask. I explained the game and that was it. She later told me she'd told her friend she'd rather have me hanging out with my friends playing a game in the basement than out drinking.
This was actually pretty close to my experience with it, except my folks bought it for me for Christmas. It actually got me to a point where I *WAS* socializing with other people (I was a horrific introvert prior to that, and took getting 'grounded' as a *reward* rather than the punishment it was meant to be)
And then a *lovely* piece of work from the city to the west of our community murdered two of his classmates and claimed the influence of the games as the causal factor in June, 1985.
The two local gaming shops closed.
The only shop that even remotely carried anything related to gaming had to put the gaming materials in the black-covered holders and you had to show some sort of ID to even get access to the area until the store owner *knew* you well enough that he wasn't in fear of losing his retail license.
No lie, it was worse than trying to buy porn. You could walk into any convenience shop and buy porn, pretty much, but gaming material? "THAT'S SATIN'S INFLUENCE!" (mis-spelling deliberate) *headdesk*
I didn't get back into gaming until 1989, when I was on a Scouting trip and managed to play my first game of BattleTech...