“IT’S MY FAULT BLACKLEAF DIED! I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT HER!”
I guess the style checker doesn’t like allcaps.
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I always loved the fact that whoever wrote that clearly didn’t play the game. It’s called make believe. You can just make shit up to serve your purposes.
GM: “A wandering wizard passes by and casts a resurrection spell. Black Leaf is alive but must rest until the next quest. There, now you don’t have to commit suicide in real life. Happy?”
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I still remeber our D&D group being accosted by Christians at Denny’s after a game. They were so worried we were going to sell our souls to Satan, who they were sure we could get to in the books. We then started asking them where, and how. They lost interest in us after that.
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I was a bit too young for the original satanic panic but stuff like that never quite dies in the fundamentalist scheme of things.
Hell, last time I hung out in that crowd, they still regularly preached against gnosticism even though they “knew” it wasn’t around anymore (I didn’t have the heart to tell them that no it hadn’t died completely).
When I was “that” age, they mostly focused on the evils of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins. Although toward the end of my … sentence with the youth-oriented end of things, I remember them preaching against role playing online. Specifically in chat rooms.
I remember being extremely confused about how taking dice and a GM away but adding TCP/IP to the mix made it so bad. Later on someone quietly explained to me the sermon was about [that era’s equivalent of sexting]. 
But even if they weren’t preaching about it, I still had acquaintances my age telling me about how when they played MTG their eyes glowed gold and they ended up burning all their decks.
I almost wish I could have traded the guilt I did get for the guilt over table top RPGs. I’m pretty sure the guilt I got was mandatory and the guilt I didn’t get was optional. 
As an aside, my cadre non-ironically distributed Chick tracts. They even used them once as homework to teach us about other religions. 
There’s a better than good chance I have the D&D tract wedged between a pile of floppies somewhere.
I didn’t participate in the handing out of any tracts so it’s almost like I helped keep some out of circulation.
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http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp
Chick Tracts are almost impossible not to read. They are universally insane ramblings that are summed up with the magic powers of a evangelist. I mean the recommended reading based on this comic is a book about how to save vampires with Jesus..
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Yeah, TheBibleReloaded on Youtube does readings of Chick Tracts, and it’s just fucking hilarious. Until you realize there’s people with power who actually believe those syphilitic ramblings.
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Who needs magic spells to get your parents to buy things for you when you’re a kid? By the time you’re old enough to play D&D, you’ve already figured out how to manipulate or negotiate with your parents to buy you want you want (or give you the money) or you’ve figured out how poor or tightfisted they are and you find an alternative, such as hanging out with friends who have more permissive parents or a collection of D&D manuals you could borrow.
And if such manipulation spells actually existed, the Chick Tract would have recruited a hell of a lot more souls for witchcraft than it managed to “save.”
A guy who used to frequent a discussion board I also frequented at the time told us how he’d been lectured that D&D was a pagan trap to lead good Christians astray back when he was a kid, both an evangelical and an avid D&D fan. As he was a wiz at biblical exegesis he decided to check this claim out and discovered there was no doctrinal basis for it whatsoever. This led him to wonder what else his Christian elders had been lying to him about and in due course he lost his faith, becoming the secular iconoclast he is today.
…whiiich, in a way, kinda proved their original claim, I guess.
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I couldn’t get people to play with me in my small town. I’d loan the basic Edition book to friends and they would be like, “My mom says I can’t play.”
I moved to a bigger city/school, and found people who were like, “Satanists play that game.”
“So? They probably also play Monopoly. Does that make the game Satanic?” Ok bad example…
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I imagine that it’s the sort of thing that is hard to keep up, even without getting any smarter: outrage fatigue has sapped many a worthy cause with something outrageous actually happening, usually repeatedly or continually, to be outraged about; because caring that much is hard work and tends to be its on reward in the weak sense that it’s its only reward.
Plus, when the premise requires that some nontrivial percentage of children apparently being sacrificed to satan and/or inducted into witchcraft by RPGs, you really only get a generation, best case, before the people you were moral panicking about grow up and become the moral panickers; and are pretty sure that they never ended up paying homage to Our Dread Lord; nor can they think of anyone closer than the only-played-for-laughs friend-of-a-friend’s-cousin’s-brother’s-girlfriend’s-somebody who did end up as either a satanist or a sacrifice.
Doesn’t mean that they found something any less idiotic to panic about; but does provide a strong incentive to at least find something novel.
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most perfect .GIF for this story ever. #TheresBloodOnMyKnife
As another victim of D&D censorship I luckily managed to survive without my imagination too far atrophied.
I guess it may even be harder for kids today (secular and indoctrinated) with so much entertainment taking place within guidelines and rules established by others.
Sometimes I wonder if we play games or the games play us…
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It’s always amazing to me that those kind don’t get the irony that they believe in a guy with a pointy tail and a pitch fork exists in a scary place for bad people.
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You need to roll two d10 now.
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Francis Xavier is a Jerk!
– Kitty Pryde.
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Moral panics are caused by Satan! Pass it on!
Hey, you never know - it might just work…
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That was Poe’s-Law-tastic!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
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My friend grew up in a Christian fundie household in England, so he’s basically a unicorn. All that god-fearin’ upbringing means he likes drugs, hanging out with strippers and listening to noise bands very loud. Mind you, I grew up in a hippie atheist household and so do I, so correlation maybe doesn’t prove causation… 
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