Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Daub

This week we travel back to the 80s, when America’s parents decided to freak out over some kids rolling dice and drawing things on graph paper! Adrian Daub walks Sarah through the history of Dungeons & Dragons, and the panic it inspired. 

Content note: The story we're telling today also involves suicide; please listen with care. 

Find Adrian online here.

Buy his book The Cancel Culture Panic here. 

And check out this delightful 60 Minutes segment about the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons from 1985.

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Transcript

YWA - Dungeons and Dragons

Sarah: I'm going to start a panic about Clue teaching kids to commit murder.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we get to talking about the Satanic Panic, and this time we're talking about it with Adrian Daub, co-host of In Bed with the Right and a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast. Which is wonderful for us, because today we're talking about the part of the Satanic Panic that was fixated back in the 80s, not on the idea that daycare workers were infiltrating preschools as part of organized satanic cults so that they could gain access to children to engage in cult rituals, but instead the part of the satanic panic focused on the fear of Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy role playing game that you might think of as a harmless way to spend time with your friends. But according to some Satanic Panic organizers and entrepreneurs, was actually a game capable of breaking the brains of teenagers, especially new college students, suffering them from reality and driving them to devil worship or worse.

This is an episode about one of the more ridiculous corners of the Satanic Panic, but it's also an episode about parents trying to understand what to do with information that they perhaps don't have a way to handle. And in this case, it's about a panic over a game that is spawned to some extent by parental grief over the death by suicide of teenage children. 

So this episode certainly gets into that subject matter at times. And I would say that you can't talk about one part of the Satanic Panic without talking about all of the more complex implications of the whole thing. But this is also an episode where we do talk about Dungeons and Dragons quite a lot, and I do think that it might make some of you want to go start a campaign after you listen to this episode.

If you want to find more of our show, you can of course always do that on Patreon and Apple+ subscriptions. We have an episode up there right now that I really love about the sequel to Rosemary's Baby, Son of Rosemary. I get to talk about it with Sarah Archer at great length. I got to do a little bit of a Jerry Orbach impression. It's not a good sequel, but is it a delight to talk about? It is. And that's what I'm always looking for. 

And our next bonus episode that we're putting out is a sequel to the episode you're about to listen to, because we're talking about Mazes and Monsters, the TV movie that capitalized on and helped legitimize the panic over Dungeons and Dragons, and also includes Tom Hanks in his first leading role. And you know what? He's good in it. Okay, that's all you need to know. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for coming with us once again on this trip to the Satanic Panic. Here's your episode. 

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where from the beginning, we've been talking about the Satanic Panic. And today, we're talking about the role-playing game aspect of it. And we were talking about it with Adrian Daub. Adrian, hello. 

Adrian: Hi. 

Sarah: Thank you for being here. How is your summertime going? 

Adrian: It's going well. I was in Europe for a little while. I'm from Germany originally, and so I got to go home a little bit and I've been back for a couple of days.

Sarah: You leave this country alone for five minutes, and the things we get up to. 

Adrian: I know. And who knows when this will air, but yeah, you've definitely been keeping me in suspense.

Sarah: Yeah, it's safe to say that when this comes out, we'll not be in a more normal place. 

Adrian: No. Listeners are encouraged to just attach whatever I just said to whatever craziness came down the pike this particular week. 

Sarah: Yeah, fill in the blank. 

Adrian: Yeah. 

Sarah: Yeah, it's a mad lib. Can you believe that Lindsey Graham was caught in flagrante delicto with his ant farm? And it's yeah, I believe that. Yeah. And what else do you do when you're not talking to me on this show? 

Adrian: So I'm a professor at Stanford University. I'm a literary scholar by training, and I am a podcaster, too. I have two podcasts, In Bed with the Right and The Feminist Present, both of which you've been on, which was great. And I also, I've harbored a long-time fascination with moral panics. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Adrian: In particular, I've got a book coming out in September about the cancel culture panic. And the other thing about me is that I've been playing role playing games for quite a long time. And so this was the moral panic that I watched take shape as I was engaging in the behavior everyone was freaking out about. Which is not every moral panic, but it's certainly something that I feel like gives one a really interesting and acute view of how these things come together, right? I was like, wait, I do these things and I don't think I'm getting into Satanism, right? 

Sarah: Yeah, that's what you think. That's what Satan wants you to think. 

Adrian: I know. That's what big Satan was trying to get me to accept. 

Sarah: Yeah. The internal memos that were leaked from big Satan. Yeah. So central to the satanic panic, of course, is panic over kids. But it's so interesting for me to take a second and situate this, and with the satanic panic also, the more I learn about it, the less I feel confident in many ways speaking to cause and effect. Because you think sometimes a lake is formed by a river, and sometimes a river is formed by many smaller tributaries, right? 

Maybe this is a good place to hand it to you, because I think my research has focused more on the intense fears that adults are feeling and get to channel through rumors of Satanism for the welfare of little children, many of whom are going into some kind of a daycare situation and in larger numbers than has occurred in the past. And also into a lot of private daycare and kind of jerry rigged, underfunded daycare, because Reagan has just slashed daycare funding, obviously. 

Then, not to leave anybody out of the party, we have probably an equally sized panic about older children, in particularly adolescents, and I feel like that's where we get into your territory. 

Adrian: That's exactly right. I do think that unlike the kind of Satanic Panic around schools and daycares in the 80s, this one is a ‘think about the children’ kind of panic, but the children keep inching up. In that way, it is actually a lot like our college panics of today or the trans panic, right?  The panic around trans kids, which ends up being about these people who transition in their twenties. And you're like, I'm sorry, when does someone stop being a child? 

Sarah: 45. 

Adrian: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so this is very noticeable here that a lot of the cases are implicitly about middle and high schoolers, but then a lot of examples are pulled from colleges. And some of this I tried to research this as much as I could. It's unclear to me how successful D&D was at which age bracket. I'll have a little bit more to say about that maybe later, but it does appear to have been a college phenomenon as well. Meaning it then becomes really hard to yeah, as you say, these people can be drafted into war, surely they can roll a 20-sided die without running a serious risk to their febrile imagination, right? 

Sarah: You would hope so. The contrast is striking, yeah. And I wonder, is it a good place to start by asking what is Dungeons and Dragons? 

Adrian: Yeah, happy to explain that a little bit.

Sarah: Nice. 

Adrian: So Dungeons and Dragons, it's over 50 years old by now, is a fantasy role playing game and first started in 1973. 

Sarah: It outlived Roe v. Wade. Congrats. 

Adrian: I know. My God. Yeah. Basically it grew out of tactical wargaming. 

Sarah: Like Risk, although I don't know if that existed yet. 

Adrian: That did exist, but no, this is a little bit more involved. This is the kind of stuff where people build terrain and measure with rulers how far their Napoleonic army miniatures can move, that kind of thing. So it grows out of that, meaning I think it was intended initially as a hobby for adults. 

It's the brainchild of Gary Gygax, who's famous for this mostly, though there are a couple of other people that founded this company TSR in 1973. And their idea is basically what if we do a kind of tactical game that kind of detaches from this kind of map and terrain aspect, even though there still are maps, but that mostly happens in everyone's imagination. 

And then the way a role-playing game normally will work is that one person is, and this depends on which game you're playing, but it's called the Dungeon Master, famously in D&D, other systems referred to as the storyteller or the game master. Someone has to mind the world. Someone has to present what these individual players and their characters are encountering, and then everyone else at the table embodies one character. And so in a typical D&D game, that'll be the sort of a Lord of the Rings type adventure where someone's the elf, someone is a dwarven fighter. And part of the fun is that you're pretty open ended in what you do. And that role playing is sort of part of the experience. 

That is to say that if one person is playing the elf and the other person is playing a dwarven warrior, you can have a repartee, you can decide that they have an animosity or a deep friendship and then have that influence how you play the game. So it's a mix between a tactical game and collaborative storytelling, really. 

Sarah: Yeah, and like improv as well, maybe. 

Adrian: Yeah, it can be. Certainly, as you can imagine, you can accentuate this any which way. That is to say, there are people who play this like a big board game and move figures around on a map and roll dice. And then there are others who barely even look at dice. And where, if someone says I want to convince a city guard that they should let us in without paying customs or whatever, you could have a dungeon master who says okay, roll a die, we'll find out whether this worked, or a dungeon master who says, okay, lay it on me. What do you say? How do you do it? And then says, okay, that's pretty good. That's pretty persuasive, right? 

It's a type of game that really, on the one hand, allows for very many different play styles. It's the kind of game where you have to talk about, and again, like an improv exercise, we have to decide ahead of time, how are we going to do this? How are we going to play it? And the other thing is it can grow with you. People return to these games. There are people I play with who are in their fifties and they've been playing since they were teens. And I'm sure they're not playing the same game. I'm sure they're not playing it the same way. But precisely because you can modulate exactly how this game is going to work, people can come back to it and have totally different experiences years or even decades apart.

Sarah: Yeah, I love that. And I guess, for full disclosure on my background, I have played D&D a couple times with friends, and I enjoyed parts of it. And also just, I think, have the wrong attention span for games. There are not that many games I play consistently in my life. I had a brief and intense Clue phase. But a lot of the time it's like the explaining of the rules and the explaining of the structure just goes on for so long at the start. I'm like, I can't do this! 

But I feel like there's something so appealing, and I can at the same time see maybe the seeds of why certain people would freak out about this. Of having a game not necessarily as a means to somebody winning and somebody losing, but to really have a huge amount of imaginative world building it would seem. Because you have to create characters and then you have to make a place for them to exist in. 

Adrian: Absolutely. And I think you're already hitting on two key points here. I think one is the game is extremely long, it's potentially endless, and it is something that is hard to do casually. I think you get sucked in pretty badly once you really get a taste for it for the very simple reason that part of the fun is collectively telling a story as a group over weeks and sometimes years. I had a D&D game that ran for a year and a half until we decided, okay, I think the story is now over. Every week we'd meet and keep playing. And when the group then just met the next week and started a new story, basically. 

The other thing that I think D&D is famous for and that often it turns people off, let's say, is that the rule books are just enormous, right? So this experience let's say for a parent of a child playing this game is they buy all this stuff, they're surrounded by these thick foliants of rules that I can't make heads or tails of, and then they mumble to each other and talk for hours and hours in our sweat smelly basement, right? And I don't even understand what they're doing, right? And sometimes they're very happy. Sometimes they're very upset. I don't understand what they're doing. So it has this kind of impenetrability. 

And of course it also, even during its heyday, had a kind of social stigma. It's usually not for people at the very top of the social pecking order. And obviously lugging a 300-page rule book and a 20-sided die across the schoolyard is not the number one way to avoid bullying. So you niche-ify yourself by playing these games. You're not, at least you didn't used to be, someone who made a lot of connections. It’s rather you found the other freaks who love this stuff and sat down with them. 

Sarah: I don't know. Culturally as well because adults respond to peer pressure too, it turns out, it feels like the kind of child that people are pressured to want to have is impossible. It's the impossible child, Penrose's impossible child, where it's perfectly rule-abiding, not rebellious, but also not a nerd or anything. And it’s like, I don't even know. Are we talking about a budding serial killer or what?

Adrian: Exactly. And cynically, you could say this was a panic that eventually set in over fantasy role playing games, was the way to make sure you worried about every fucking kid in America, right? Oh, does your kid do drugs? No, he sits in our basement. Oh, does he not read? Oh, no, he reads all the time.

Sarah: But is he reading too much? Or the wrong things? 

Adrian: Yeah, exactly. It is the wrong kind of reading. Exactly. It's so weird. So cynically, you could say yeah, they just figured out how to freak out about even the most sort of non-threatening kids in America.

Sarah: And it's like wow, imagine reading a thick book about ancient times and epic battles.  

Adrian: I know. 

Sarah: Sounds non-Christian to me. Come on. 

Adrian: I'm sorry. I think you're just raising a nerd, man. There is a kind of anxiety that attaches to the way children play in general. But there is also a way in which American capitalism starts realizing, hey, we can actually get kids to buy a whole lot more games if we tell them, your parents are going to hate this shit. 

And that definitely was true of D&D, right? We're going to talk a little bit about this incredible panic that grew up around the game. We're going to talk about the fact that they really felt themselves to be under assault, the people who made this game. On the other hand, while all that is true, I'd invite your listeners to think about the fact that they are printing money at the same time. It's the ultimate Streisand effect, right? Because this is the game parents hate. And every 15-year old's like, “Say no more! Take my $20.” 

Sarah: Yeah, and I'm sure that it has some scary ramifications. But also, yeah, that is incredible free advertising and like we are still advertising it. Because I mean, I'm sure that this did spill over into other games but we all know that Dungeons and Dragons is the Satanic Panic game. I'm going to start a panic about Clue. 

Adrian: That's right. 

Sarah: It’s teaching kids to commit murder. I wonder, where does the panic part of the story start? Does it come from many directions? Or is there like a central figure in all this who gets it rolling? 

Adrian: So I do think it starts with James Dallas Egbert III. I think there are earlier cases, but this is really the one where it captures the imagination. So maybe I'll give you just a little bit of a timeline. 

So TSR was founded in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in 1973. It's basically in Gary Gygax's basement, I think. I think the building today is a D&D museum, in fact. So the first edition of D&D, I think, is ’74, and it's something like a thousand copies and it sells out immediately. In 1977, they released Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which I think super kick starts this. And then in 1979... 

Sarah: Theoretical Dungeons and Dragons. 

Adrian: I know. It gave a wonderful Community episode its title, so there's that. But it gives you a sense of just how quickly this explodes, there's two different versions of this game suddenly, and it's selling just like hot cakes. I don't know the exact numbers. 

Sarah: Yeah, but it's like any other toy or game idea that hits, it's like, it doesn't exist, and then suddenly every child has one of those slap bracelets.

Adrian: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It does extremely well, above all on college campuses that it really makes its first splash. 

Sarah: Yeah. It seems like a great thing to stay up all night playing. 

Adrian: I know, right? Yeah. And so it's probably appropriate then that I think that the real panic sort of kicks off at a university campus, Michigan State University. Where in August of 1979, I believe, James Dallas Egbert III disappears. And there is a private investigator, Bill Dear, who's brought in to find him. 

And there is a suspicion that he disappeared into the steam tunnels underneath the school. It's also often thought of the ‘steam tunnel incident’. And Dear floats to the media this theory which I don't think he originates. Other people have suggested that Egbert might've headed into the tunnels in order to do what we today would call a LARP, a live action role playing around his D&D campaign or whatever. Why he would go there by himself with a game that is almost always played in groups, I don't know, but that's the suggestion. 

There's a whole bunch of things that are interesting about James Dallas Egbert, but the media fixates on the fact that he's this avid D&D player. He's a 16-year-old. He's just absolutely brilliant. Graduated high school at 13, started college at 14. Which also gets at this point you were making earlier that he's the kind of kid you want, and now he's missing, right? And so all the pieces are here for you to get to worry about the kids who are not smoking dope. It turns out he was also smoking dope, but they did not know that then.

Sarah: Kids contain multitudes. 

Adrian: That's right. Yeah, exactly. It's a college campus in ‘79. I mean, come on. So eventually Egbert is found. He calls Bill Dear and says, “Hey, can you come pick me up?” 

Sarah: Bill Dear is like, “Thank God, I was about to find you, by the way.” 

Adrian: I know, he writes his entire book about his genius moves, and then he gets a call from the guy he's finding. I'm like, I don't know, man, that feels like he caught a lucky break there. 

Sarah: Call off the day early and hit the links at that point, yeah.  

Adrian: I know, right? But the story, importantly, Dear never says that much about the case right after it's resolved. And I should say, unfortunately, and there's a trigger warning here for folks, James Dallas Egbert III dies in August 1980 by suicide. He goes back to his home in Dayton, Ohio and shoots himself there. 

And so basically, this sort of is associated in the popular imagination, steam tunnels, suicide, D&D, it all gets bunched together. And until 1984, when Dear writes this book, he never disputes this, right? He heavily milked the D&D angle while working the case. And yet if you read the book a little against the grain, or not even that against the grain, it's pretty clear part of the reason why Egbert had been so hard to find is that he didn't want to be found. He was scared of all the publicity. He apparently had been just hanging out in Lansing, switching houses, crashing with older men. Probably gay men who didn't want to be tangled up with this kind of case to begin with, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Adrian: And so basically, Dear kind of keeps the homosexuality angle and the drug angle out of the coverage mostly, and that means D&D. It's all about D&D, right? 

Sarah: And that has to stand in for everything else in a way, right?

Adrian: Exactly, right? It turns out there were things about James Dallas Egbert that his parents didn't know. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Adrian: But D&D was only the half of it, right? It really had to do with other things that are very tragic and tell us a lot about those sort of late seventies. But the game was really ancillary to that, it seems. And even when he released the book in 1984, he called it the dungeon master, right? Like he plays up the D&D angle.

The letter that they send out to publicists are all about here's some press clippings from the time about D&D and about rumors of witch cults, drug rings, et cetera, et cetera. And then if you read the book, he's like, yeah, no, that kind of wasn't it. 

Sarah: Yeah, but any publisher I'm sure is going to say there's no book in how I found a troubled kid who happened to also play Dungeons and Dragons. You have to make it this other story. 

Adrian: Exactly. Not that we have to blame Dear exclusively here. Because by 1981, you also have the amazing novel, Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, an absolute stone cold classic of the genre.

Sarah: Rona Jaffe wrote one of the classic New York career girl novels, The Best of Everything, and it's so delightful to me that she, I don't know, would seem to be two very different genres, and yet, she did it. She's like Isaac Asimov. 

Adrian: Yeah. Allegedly, she wrote the book really fast, which, having reread it really fast, Over the last weekend, I would definitely believe.

Sarah: It's like how Ray Parker Jr. wrote Ghostbusters in half an hour. You're like yeah, I believe that. 

Adrian: Yeah, it checks out. So just to give you a sense of how this notoriety is interacting with D&D's success. The same year the novel came out, TSR Hobbies has, according to Wikipedia, revenues of $12.9 million and 130 people on payroll. It's a juggernaut, right? And then we got a TV movie of the week on CBS in 1982 called, Mazes and Monsters. Pretty faithful to the book, starring the one and only Tom Hanks. Have you seen this thing? 

Sarah: I have watched it. Yeah. I watched it with my friend Jenna a few years ago. I remember being very charmed by it. And in Mazes and Monsters, we have this quartet of college friends. And I feel like one of them is modeled on James Dallas Egbert. He's young to be in college, he seems a little bit more troubled. And then it's a big twist because Tom Hanks is the one who confuses Dungeons and Dragons with reality. And you're like, I did not see that coming. 

Adrian: Yeah, it's an odd one, I think. As far as moral panic movies go, it's not actually that panicky, right? There's no seducer. 

Sarah: There's no Satan in it.

Adrian: Yeah, it's like, hey kids, want to try some D&D? There's none of that. It's basically just a bunch of damaged youngsters more or less unraveling together. 

Sarah: Like you'll find in any college because that's what college is. It's where you recover from the trauma of whatever you dealt with at home, partly. It just doesn't seem like getting stuck in a game comes up very much, or if it does, it's not because of the game. 

And this idea that a game is powerful enough to break your brain, I don't know, it feels like the way I thought about horror movies when I like, on some level, I thought that if I watched The Exorcist, I could die.

Adrian: Yeah, I feel like Mazes and Monsters is trying to be a drug movie. 

Sarah: Oh yeah, totally, wow, yeah. For a movie of the weak premise, it's pretty good. But then when it gets more political, you're like, oh no. No. 

Adrian: Yeah, it makes its way into the mainstream. I would say CBS movie of the week is pretty mainstream. It gets mixed in there.

Sarah: Yeah. A lot of people watched those. I realized that TV movies now feel distant, and we watch them and sometimes they can feel like they have very little cultural legacy. Because some were big and some weren't, but the ones that hit it big really hit it. And this is one that people know and remember to some extent. 

Adrian: Yeah. If for no other reason than it was, I think, Tom Hanks's first starring role or first role, maybe even.  

Sarah: Loved ‘80s Tom Hanks. 

Adrian: Yeah. And then there's the second thing that's important to note here is that the year that Mazes and Monsters the movie comes out is also the suicide of Irving Pulling. And Pat Pulling, his mother, will start this kind of explicitly Christian crusade against D&D. This is the group with the amazing acronym BADD, B A D D. 

Sarah: I love it. 

Adrian: Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons, founded in 1983, I believe. 

Sarah: They're bad. They're bad. They're really bad. Yeah. 

Adrian: And the same year again that Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons starts, it's also when the famous D&D Saturday morning cartoon debuts on CBS, right?

Sarah: What? Oh my God. I forgot this happened. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. 

Adrian: And unlike the recent D&D movie starring Chris Pine, this one actually thematizes the gaming situation, right? The D&D movie, if you saw it, is just a D&D adventure. This is really there is a dungeon master, I think, and there are teens being pulled into a fantasy world, et cetera, et cetera. So it actually is really about the gaming situation. So it's this funny thing where the criticism and the cultural dominance of this phenomenon sort of are moving apace. There's no lag there. They just happen at the same time. 

Sarah: Wow. And I forgot that it was a Saturday morning cartoon at any point. That's pretty great. 

Adrian: Yeah. What's a little bit more unique is I believe in ‘84, you get the first novels put out by Random House through the TSR imprint. So that's when you can start reading D&D novels. And that becomes a big thing throughout, I think, the 80s and 90s. And it is, fun fact, how I learned English.

Sarah: Aww, that's so cool. 

Adrian: Yeah, they're quite readable, it turns out. Some of them are quite good, but many of them use a, let's say somewhat more limited vocabulary. It was perfect for someone just starting out. 

Sarah: There were Clue books that I read. And in retrospect, I'm like, how could you even ring a book out of Clue. There were a bunch of them at the start of every single one. Mr. Body would be like, Hello, I'm alive. I don't know why we thought I was dead last time, but I am alive. And then they'd be like, Oh my god, he's been murdered. Let's look for clues! 

Adrian: At least one clue. We must have at least one clue. I talked earlier about walking into a D&D game can be a little baffling. I do wonder how many parents really walked into D&D games at all, because it's hard to schedule one of these things. It really, I can see why people in college are able to do it, because that’s the time when you’ve got fuck all to do.

Sarah: That's the time when you do things that you need to get nine people together for.

Adrian: I know, and you know where everyone lives, you can just knock on their door. Yeah. In middle school me and my friends played very little. What we did was we read collectively, right? We drew up characters, we made maps, we generated adventures. We read the novels and talked about them, right? Ultimately, this wasn't so much us playing an inscrutable game, it was far more scrutable than that. It was just a bunch of kids reading a bunch of shit and everyone being like, “Oh, no.” 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like there's an element of this of kids being into something. I don't know. I feel like to some degree, nature abhors a vacuum. Kids want to have big enthusiasm about stuff. 

Adrian: Yeah. And I think that as the hobby has aged too, I think that some of these things have changed. The Satanic Panic did not do in TSR. TSR died in the most hilarious way possible, of its own success.

Sarah: Yeah, that'll happen. 

Adrian: But there is this kind of 1984, 1985, or maybe even 1990, if you walked into a game store, the first thing you would have been struck by would have been how many options there were and how many ways to play D&D. Part of what it was telling you was the infinity of time. You're young, you have all the time in the world, huh? Why not buy this and try that too? 

And anyone actually trying to do any of these things and realize them at the game table would have found that they had overbought horribly, but that was not the point. The point was this kind of limitlessness. And I think in that way it is the measureless-ness of childhood reading, the way that people can consume just intense numbers of formulaically written YA novels in a row, right? This is what this is. Part of the fun is the fact that you hope you could do it forever. 

Sarah: How old were you when you first discovered D&D? Aside from that, what else drew you to it? What did you love about it? Or, what do you continue to love?  

Adrian: I think I was eight or nine, I would say, would be my guess. Although, before we got the first game to the table, I probably was 10. And I think that's part of what drew me to it. It was not for everyone. It was weird. You didn’t have to be physical. It involved intense kind of bonding, sharing that with other people, spending that much time with other people is a fun thing.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Adrian: It felt different from like team sports or whatever. 

Sarah: It's interesting to look at it as like an adult panic over children bonding in a way that isn't about them relying on each other's physical abilities. We have to just accept that it's not going to work for all kids.

Adrian: It's noticeable, right? The question of sexuality sort of threads through a lot of this early stuff. And yeah, I was a gay kid in the 1980s. I think I'm not the only one who basically gravitated towards the make-believe side of things. I think that there's a connection there, and I think parents probably accurately sensed that the kid that was withdrawing from them for the game might be withdrawing from them in other ways. But they didn't draw the obvious conclusion of being like, “Hey, let's sit down. Is there something you want to talk to us about?” They instead were like, “Oh, no, it's got to be the Satanists” or whatever. 

Sarah: Something I was thinking about in terms of the Satanic Panic, then and now, in the 80s you had this more bipartisan panic. Where what we have today is very politicized. It's very based on conspiracy theories that are based specifically on supporting and protecting the agenda of the far right. But at the time, it was trying to be Santa's bag and have something for every fear, in a way, whether you were secular or religious or conservative or liberal. 

And now we are saying out loud, we're not just going to blame Satan, generally. We are being very clear in aligning Satan with your child having a queer teacher, your child ever hearing about anything to do with anything gender, queerness, gayness, any of it. That's satanic. And I think that was the undercurrent in the 80s, the undertow of the whole thing. But people weren't saying it out loud the way that they are now, I think. 

Adrian: I think that's right. 

Sarah: Or, it was more normal to just be incredibly homophobic in a mainstream cultural way. So I guess people were saying it out loud, but not as part of a conspiracy theory, just as part of daily life. So I don't know if that's an improvement. 

Adrian: Certainly what it was maybe a fear that parents had that they knew they no longer could voice as starkly as maybe they could have 20 years prior, right? And I think this is a way to have a concern without having to admit what your concern might be, right?

Sarah: Yeah. You're like, I don't want to have one of those tabletop role playing game type kids, if you know what I'm saying. 

Adrian: Yeah. A little light in the D20. In the Christian right freakout about D&D, homosexuality is still part of the litany, right? It involves Satanism, bestiality, homosexuality, et cetera, et cetera. So that is still part of their pitch, but it's true that when 60 Minutes sits down with these supposed experts, that's nowhere to be seen. 

So you're right that that's still percolating sort of in the background, but people know better than to lead with it. This could make your kids gay. That's in there, but people are too smart to say that out loud. 

Sarah: And then that can be the more acceptable face of the fear that you can then slip whatever else you want into stuffing a turkey. 

Adrian: Yeah. So in 1984, you also get the murder of Mary, I think it's pronounced Towey, by Darren Molitor in Missouri. And Molitor introduces basically a diminished capacity defense because he had been an avid D&D player. 

Sarah: Okay. If I'm a lawyer in 1984, I’ve got to grasp whatever straws I can lay hold to.

Adrian: Yeah. You're like, I just saw this movie with Tom Hanks. This is perfect. 

Sarah: You're like, honey, I'm out of ideas. Let's do the Hanks defense. 

Adrian: They were initially going to go with the Big defense. And then they were like, no, I think that the D&D defense is better. 

Sarah: Yeah. D&D defense is better. 

Adrian: And he presents two expert witnesses at trial, Pat Pulling and this guy Thomas Radecki, who is part of the Bothered About D&D crowd as well. And he writes this long essay, Darren Molitor, full of Bible quotes explaining basically how the game took hold of his mind. And so I think that sort of kickstarts the whole thing. 

In 1985, we get that 60 Minutes report, which basically is all about Pat Pulling. She's both the expert and the concerned parent that Bill Whitaker mostly interacts with. So she really is key in pushing this kind of concerned about TV violence script onto this game that does contain some violence and has some violent imagery on its covers, but is ultimately tame compared to…

Sarah: It's a pretty violent culture. Parents who are raising kids in the ‘80s probably grew up watching Westerns, which I realize are in the mid-century, were less gory than the kind of thing we have now. But you could also make the argument that shows kids that you can get shot and recover from it easily and not suffer too badly by falling off a horse or having some kind of head injury. So singling out Dungeons and Dragons as the perfect most violent component of American society is a bit rich.

Adrian: So Pulling very much is, as I say, drawing on the sort of TV violence template in her campaign. But she also does something that I know quite well from the Satanic Panic. She starts going to police departments. And that's where we start getting just a bunch of false positives. 

Basically, it's this very strange kind of vicious cycle that the kind of Satanism crusaders and cops entered in the mid 80s, where basically they receive training. And then every time someone does something violent, they're like, “Oh, could there be a dungeon master's guide somewhere within 20 yards of this person?”

Sarah: Maybe, but it's not the first thing I'd look at! 

Adrian: Yeah. Exactly. Just to give you one example, in1985 there's the case of James Alan Kearbey, which is basically a proto-Columbine style shooting in Kansas. And in hindsight, it seems that D&D played very little role in this at all. But the police reported every time saying, “Oh, this is the thing from the seminar with that nice lady.” So this is a very common thing. It sort of enters into kind of the criminal justice discourse, basically. 

Sarah: Right. Yeah. And I find it so fascinating, the whole cult cop circuit where you have this sort of this fascinating kind of circle jerk, I guess, is the correct term for it. Where you have cops going around the country, and other interested people like Pat Pulling giving presentations to local police departments. Or if you look at newspapers from the 80s, there will often be, “coming up at the community center, learning to recognize Satanism” and give these talks around the U.S. and starting to spill into other countries eventually. But you just get this sort of network of cops talking to other cops, all sharing the same handful of stories, but circulating so much that it feels like more than it is. Which is essentially how schoolyard rumors happen. 

Adrian: Yeah. Yeah. 

Sarah: And they're acting like the very children they claim to be so concerned about, but they have guns. 

Adrian: Yeah. And they then keep getting interviewed, right? 

Sarah: And then it's on TV. And as a civilian, you're like, it has to be a problem, the cops are talking about it and it's on TV! Because the more you hear about something, the more real it feels. I feel like everyone is drinking espresso martinis without me, and that can't be true! 

Adrian: Right? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things happening here. On the one hand, you have the Christian right. Which is also, I think, starting to make inroads into school boards, et cetera, et cetera. So a lot of these ideas are starting to enter the mainstream and they need good stalking horses. And D&D is a better one than some other things that parents might have more of an idea about. 

Then it's also, I think it's this weird connection to law enforcement, which sort of produces its own not quite false positives, but its own positives, right? Pat Pulling will, at some point, claim that in the last 10 years, whenever she says this, I think in ‘88 or ‘89, there have been over 100 cases of murder or suicide where D&D played a role. What she means is that someone found D&D paraphernalia near, not on the person, but in the possession of the person doing the thing. 

And this is at a time when there's 3-4 million kids playing D&D across the United States, so you're going to get these kinds of numbers, right? You're going to get some numbers. Some kids out of those three to four million are going to harm themselves or others.

Sarah: Right? Any culture that has that scale of saturation of society, you can find all kinds of data points and act like they're connected. I realize this is on a bigger scale, but it's like saying that people committed murder because they had listened to Taylor Swift at some point, like there are probably people who have committed murders recently who had listened to Taylor Swift at some time before the murder. But are those related phenomena? Probably not. I realize some people really hate Taylor Swift, and we get excited about that idea. But, yeah. 

Adrian: The other thing to think about, of course, is that the Satanism or cult angle, as you were pointing out, becomes necessary to keep this whole thing going.

Sarah: It's thin. 

Adrian: That's the thing. Once you think about it as a hobby, it was like yeah, this kid may have once owned a player handbook, and they may not have played for three years. But that's not how they treat it. It's basically the logic of the drug narrative, where there's only down.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Adrian: Which is like a very 80s narrative, right? The idea that someone might enjoy playing a campaign, then decide it's lame or move houses or join a sports team or whatever, right? That doesn't occur to people that just because you have at some point had a hobby, you are not then fully defined by that hobby. It only works if you don't think of it as a hobby, you do think of it as this kind of a drug or a cult. Like you will get sucked in further and further.

And I'm sure there are people who, like myself, who got really into it, but I can tell you that we lost players constantly, and they probably had the books lying around somewhere. They probably had their character sheets somewhere. They probably didn't sell their dice, but if they did something, I don't know how associated they were with D&D. 

It also did become a way, and I think this is why sort of the broader media cared a way to problematize the one set of kids that one wasn't freaking out for other things about, right? So here's a list from Pat Pulling's book, The Devil's Web, which comes out in ‘89. 

Sarah: It's a good title. 

Adrian: Great title. A profile of participants. So these are a lot of materials that she used in her seminars she would give for law enforcement. And she draws a lot on stories she's being told by law enforcement in those seminars. “Profile of participants. First, usually very intelligent. Two, creative. 3. 95% of the players are male, with the majority being Caucasian. 4. Imaginative. Adventurous. 5. Academically interested in history or computer science, with a high math aptitude and/or an interest in drama. 6. Physically either fairly slight built, clean cut, or possibly overweight and sloppy appearance.”

Sarah: This is a gay panic. They're like, we're going after the creative children now. 

Adrian: I know! It's like, leave the drama kids alone, dude. “7. Usually socio-economically from a middle to upper middle class family.” We're covering the people that you couldn't do teenage truancy or heavy metal, whatever. They don't have tattoos so you can't do the whole satanism thing. 

Sarah: You're right. It's like a big tent that all the indoor kids fit in or something, or all the kids that you don't have an excuse to be stressed about generally.

Adrian: Exactly. It gets even better. “8. Generally, the adolescent D&D player is not involved with drugs.”

Sarah: Cool!

Adrian: Boo! Hiss. Yeah. 

Sarah: Is your child taking drugs? If they're not, they could be playing D&D, so you better give them some drugs. 

Adrian: Yeah. “9. Adolescents who become heavily involved generally are, quote, ‘good kids’ with no prior behavior problems.” 

Sarah: What are the signs? If they have no prior behavioral problems, that is a red flag.

Adrian: Yeah, exactly. It's a huge red flag. The lack of red flag is a huge red flag. 

Sarah: Man, there is a side to this where you could say okay, so as a counter example, in early literature, especially about 70s, there is, and I'm thinking especially of the Golden Cage, this sort of sense of puzzlement initially by a lot of people writing about this, from some kind of clinical perspective of it's interesting that the really good obedient kids, the successful kids, the type A kids, are the ones who are presenting with severe eating disorders. And again, I think the Golden Cage makes this argument. 

The thing that seems like a sign not to worry is actually a reason to worry, because you've raised a child who doesn't feel like they're able to express discomfort or to feel autonomy, perhaps. If there are no signs of trouble and if there seem to be no signs of trouble based on the fact that they have adapted so perfectly to the standards that you've created for them, then what could be under the surface? But that's a very different question than, how do we pathologize a kid just existing? 

Adrian: Yeah. Yeah. I think that in the end, what made this catch on was simply that, and maybe this is too much armchair sociology, but this is the latchkey generation. 

Sarah: This is Gen X.

Adrian: I think the idea that there were more parts of children's lives that were inaccessible to their parents. And businesses, including TSR, were moving into the gap that was opening up. I think that's fair, right? Yeah, in a way it was capitalism all along.

Sarah: Yeah, it's fair to be worried about a corporation parenting for you. There are a few others in line in front of Gary Gygax's. 

Adrian: Gygaxies of the world, yes. Yeah, it's a fear of, your kids might be reading. You get some version of this joke in Stranger Things, right? Where the parents think their kids are playing D&D, and the kids are saving the world, right? And the absolute inability to understand any of what's going on under the roof, that's getting at something. 

And of course, in a lot of the rumpus rooms in which the kids around 13, 14 started playing D&D, they eventually would get high when they were 17 or 18. So it does live in that kind of space where parental supervision starts slackening. And I think that is what made this kind of spark fly over why people who like you manifestly should not listen to Pat Pulling could get the ear of the good folks at 60 Minutes, right? And have them take this pretty seriously.

Sarah: Yeah. And Pat Pulling, I feel like is, to me, such an interesting figure within the Satanic Panic generally. Because you have somebody who had a teenager who died by suicide, which is one of the worst things I can imagine, I guess, in terms of personal grief.

Adrian: Absolutely. 

Sarah: And you have the way that people are going to behave, especially in extreme emotional circumstances, especially when they're dealing with grief and especially over the loss of a child. And I do not hold those people to the kind of standard that I hold 60 Minutes to. And when you grieve, you often really want a quest. I really identify with that experience of it being better to just focus on a crusade or a quest for revenge than to have to just go straight into it. 

And similar to Michelle Remembers, where actually a case of people, I think not having a cynical bone in their body, but just happening to drop a match on a room full of perfectly crispy hay. What are your thoughts about her having dove into this particular part of the panic lately?

Adrian: Yeah. So it's definitely deeply tragic. And it's very clear that she's trying to give a name to the feeling that she didn't know her son as well as she thought she did. As a parent myself, that seems deeply tragic to me. And one of the things that you hear from a lot of the parents who are quoted in these kinds of pieces and these kinds of reports is that they had never even heard of Dungeons and Dragons before their child died. 

There's two ways of reading that. Either the kids are being so secretive, or you can read it as saying maybe it wasn't that important to them. They just happened to own this game. Or we could say maybe it's just a pars pro toto for a bunch of stuff, this kid was developing an inner life and you weren't part of that. Or maybe they didn't feel they could involve you with that. 

Again, given that several, I don't know about Pat Pulling's son, but a lot of these kids also turned out to be gay. So the fact that they contained an entire cosmos that they couldn't share with their parents, that's a horrible thing to find out. And I think D&D is the name that they ended up giving that. 

But as you say, because you were mentioning the responsibility of the media and I think there's one exchange from the 60 Minutes documentary, and I'll just read it to you. So this is Bill Whitaker doing a voiceover, “Until that night they'd never even heard of the game Dungeons and Dragons.” And you get a voiceover from Pat Pullings saying, “A curse that he had received in the game that day basically set him over the edge.” And then you get a voiceover from Bill Whittaker again, “The curse that was placed on Binx's D&D character that day.” 

So he takes what she's saying, she's saying my son was cursed. And he takes that as he couldn't understand what was happening. He mistook an in-game curse for real. No, so is she. Not only are you putting a grieving parent on TV, but you’re also trying to reframe what is obviously a loss of reality. 

Sarah: Yeah, because grief is really the trip that makes you lose touch with reality for a while, or one of them. 

Adrian: Yeah, and then you reframe it into this kind of concern troll-y thing. And that's not what she's saying. She's saying he was cursed, someone placed an actual curse on him. And this is something she believed in.

And that may be a good argument for maybe not platforming her on 60 Minutes, but definitely then don't go out and turn it into this kind of, oh, can kids not tell fiction from reality? No, your supposed experts can't, right?

Sarah: Yeah. And speaking of the United States of projection, this is, on some level, adults accusing teenagers and kids of having the same problems they have so that they can feel maybe a little bit more in control. I'm not just thinking about Pat Pulling here, but that we have adults having this basic existential debate over what is real. And then accusing their kids of that in a way. 

Adrian: Yeah. And there's also, of course, the old just worry about who's teaching your children, right? The Devil's Web’s subtitle is, “Who Is Stalking Your Children for Satan”. Pat Pulling in the 60 Minutes piece I remember says something like, it's not make belief. There is no game board. It is role playing, which is normally used for behavior modification. 

Sarah: What?

Adrian: This idea that this is actually role playing is usually used for behavior modification. I think they're thinking about something like cognitive behavioral therapy or something like that. But this idea that oh, they're learning these kinds of patterns of behavior. To me, there's a kind of a residual sort of anti-communist imagination there, right? 

But there are also my kids behaving in ways that I don't recognize, right? Someone must be modifying their behavior because they were such a sweet kid. There's a lot of mid 80s cope and what is admittedly a horribly tragic story. 

Sarah: It fits with the whole American concept of quote, unquote, ‘victims’ rights’, which is that for any political agenda or inflammatory media story, you can probably find somebody in the United States who has experienced a personal tragedy that would seem to support your point, if only it were not one single data point that you were framing misleadingly. 

Adrian: The other expert quoted in the 60 Minutes is Thomas Radecki. He claims to be from the University of Illinois Medical School. That turned out not to be the case. He's big into television violence. He, I think, led the National Coalition on Television Violence and the International Coalition Against Violent Entertainment. And he claims that there are like 28 deaths related to D&D in the last five years, as of 1985. Again, that seems, as the game designer Michael Stackpole will point out in a report on Radecki and Pulling in 1989, like it would mean that statistically D&D players are far less likely to do any of these things than other kids.

Sarah: It's probably just two numbers passing each other in the night. Yeah. 

Adrian: Yeah. 

Sarah: And what kind of effect does this have on people playing D&D at this time? Are there scary consequences for some of them? 

Adrian: Throughout all of this, I am sure that there were kids who were prohibited from it. I do believe that there are clubs that were forbidden, et cetera, et cetera. But by and large, the story of D&D in the 1980s is one of endless success. That is to say, the novels are on bestseller lists, the books keep selling out. Again, biggest Streisand effect ever, right? Kids gravitate towards this hobby more than they might've if there hadn't been all this press attention paid to it. 

Starting in the late eighties, I think 1988, you start getting D&D video games, which introduce a whole other generation to the world of D&D. It really almost doesn't seem to have had much of an effect at all, at least on the bottom line for the company or on the overall success of this hobby. 

What ends up undoing TSR is actually the fact that they just keep putting out stuff. There are a bunch of things that go wrong. They appear to be not business geniuses, an interesting through line. Gary Gygax, in fact, got fired from the company in 1985 after a Hollywood sojourn that appears to have involved just starlets and coke, basically.

Sarah: Will success spoil Gary Gygax? 

Adrian: I know. And ultimately I think that one of the things that undoes the company is this kind of really beautiful thing that I alluded to earlier, which is that they keep producing more settings for the game. There are more different ways to play, but of course the player base ends up fracturing. Because that is to say you have to own the player's handbook or the dungeon master's guide if you want to be a dungeon master. But you can then decide whether you want to play in a more medieval setting or you want to play in a thousand- and one-night setting, or you want to play in an Aztec setting, or whether you want to play a Celtic campaign or whatever. And there are D&D books for all of this, right? And it didn't occur to them that means that the readership fractures for each of these. 

So the very thing they were selling you on, which is like, there are infinite ways to play this. And to just give you a sense let's say you go for the Aztec thing, that's a box set, 250 pages, three full color maps, some weird like standees you could use, and maybe some handouts for players, right? People can play something like that for six months easily, maybe for a year. I'm guiding my players through a campaign. I would say it's a 200-page book and we're maybe three months in. And they put out like hundreds of these a year. No one could possibly get through any of it. And more to the point of all those millions, three to 4 million players, only really one out of five, namely the dungeon master, has to own any of this shit.

Sarah: Oh, wow. 

Adrian: The other people just buy a $1 die and show up and they're like, cool, I'm pretty ready, right? And it turns out it got eaten by capitalism because it's ultimately a pretty non- capitalist endeavor. It's a beautiful blaze of glory.

Sarah:  Yeah. And that's why it's satanic. 

Adrian: And this is something they still struggle with. DSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast to make Magic the Gathering, which in turn was bought by Hasbro, the fine folks at Hasbro. And they're still struggling with this. How do we market this object? Oh, just use your imagination. Oh, cool. So I don't have to buy anything more. Oh, I'm starting to see how the moneymaking part of this was undercooked by us. 

Sarah: And I can see why the idea of imagination is threatening for many reasons, right? And one of them is that if you are raising your child to not question certain tenets, if you're raising them to be obedient to not just a religion necessarily, but just the way that you see the world and want them to. Which I think is very common in American history is our idea of what parenting is supposed to be. Then imagination can be threatening, because what if they imagine things you don't want them to know about, then control is slipping in that way. 

But I like even better this window into, oh, imagination is the worst thing to encourage kids to use because then they won't want to buy stuff as much, and that would be terrible. 

Adrian: Yeah. The fact that they created these infinite worlds, and they were like, oh, people are not sort of coming back up to buy more of our stuff. I think things sold well, but like this was a structural problem. 

Sarah: They taught a man to fish and now he's fishing. They're like, we made you another fish kit. And he's like, no, I'm good. 

And so is this a case of American media embarking on this great folly of aligning Dungeons and Dragons with possible extreme danger to your child? And then as with so many other things, not ever admitting they made a mistake, but just backing off of it because people don't care as much anymore, or its popularity wanes and then it doesn't feel like so much of a threat? 

Adrian: I think so. But although I think there's also, unlike the Satanic Panic, I would say the cost was much less substantial to people's freedom and livelihood.

Sarah: I like that part.

Adrian: Then you have the fact that these were corporate entities, unlike big daycare, and they knew how to fight back, right? These were people who were making money doing this, they were not big faceless corporations, but this was their job and they were going to fight like hell to keep it. And so you do have people like Michael Stackpole and Gary Gygax out there pushing back, trying to explain why this is bunk. 

And then I think it really helped that a lot of the people carrying the panic were just such utter cranks and weirdos. And when you have your television violence guy on 60 Minutes being like, I heard from parents that saw their child summon a D&D demon into his room before he killed himself. And we were like, okay, that man just claimed to have seen a demon summoning on CBS news. Does this strike you as particularly serious? 

So I think that's part of it too, that it was just so outlandish that it almost was self-deflating and the fact that American capitalism in whatever tiny form through companies like TSR and some others, had a stake in this, right? It's not true for the satanic panic in general, right? This very rarely, only record labels is the only thing I can think of where the Satanic Panic found corporate actors to yell at. And these were after a fashion corporate actors. And they were going to push back, and they had the ear of media, and they had a certain amount of media savvy and they would be like, no, this is not correct.

Sarah: You can wrongfully imprison a daycare worker any day of the week, but challenge a profitable cartoon? That's much harder. Yeah, and I'm saying that like a joke because it makes me sad.

Adrian: One counterfactual I sometimes think about is what if D&D had not become big business but had been a thing that people… there are game forms out there in the seventies and eighties that are entirely done through mimeograph paper when no one's really making any money. What if that had been the path that the industry had gone down? And gee, I wonder whether it would have been far scarier, right? Because basically if it's just a bunch of things kids get up to, there's almost no limits to what American law enforcement and American media will call for or try to make happen. 

But as you say, once a profit-making corporation is there and can say, hey, that's sounding defamatory, our lords might want to explore this. It just puts a very serious limit on the kind of bullshit you can shoot your mouth off over. And this is, I think, part of the story there that I'd like to think of it as this David versus Goliath story. But it probably is, to some extent, a Goliath versus Goliath story. And if the Goliath, the second Goliath, hadn't been in the room, we might be telling a slightly darker story, I think. 

Sarah: I agree. And we love to talk about the David and Goliath story as if it's really inspiring, but also we shouldn't valorize people who knowingly go into situations where they could be crushed very easily. It's very brave to do that, but generally, people do that because they have to. And it's not great that they have to. It is the most unsurprising surprise ending that being a business rather than a person is what keeps you safe in the Satanic Panic. Let's all incorporate.

Adrian: Yeah, exactly. And there's a funny way in which we could argue that the panic really started with corporatization and IP and ended through it as well. Because the question that I don't think I talked about, but that I've thought about before is part of why people like Pat Pulling and Thomas Radecki are so freaked out about D&D is that there are demons in the game. 

And the question is like, why are there demons in the game? Much of early D&D is basically a Tolkien pastiche with some Fritz Leiber or Conan the Barbarian or something like that thrown in. But those don't tend to have, as far as I recall, Christian style medieval demons, right? And I think one reason may have been intellectual property. 

Sarah: Right. Shit. 

Adrian: There's this early book that Gary Gygax puts out, Deities and Demigods, which had stat blocks basically for monsters from the Cthulhu mythos and from Michael Moorcock’s work. And both of those sections were subsequently removed, I'm guessing, because The Lovecraft estate and Moorcock were like, “Hey, that's our stuff. What are you doing?” 

Sarah: And you can't call something a Balrog because that's the Tolkien estate. 

Adrian: Exactly. That's why D&D has halflings, not hobbits. So I wonder whether the reason those scary demons were in there in the first place was that they were like fuck, we can't have the Lovecraft estate mad at us again. Say what you will about Beelzebub, he's no one's IP, right? And so that's how it started probably, and then also it's as you say, the being corporation and the end saved them, too. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Adrian: It is the answer and the cause of and the answer to all problems like beer.

Sarah: There you go. I don't know. I do really love just the idea of late night in Lake Geneva. It's Lake night … anyway. And you're burning the midnight oil. You're like, think, think, think, what are we going to do? How are we going to get around this copyright issue? And then somebody is like, Satan! Satan is in the public domain. Or if not Satan, then like demons, whoever. 

And part of the problem of trying to have a conversation about any of this is that you can say that there are references to Satan and culture, because that's proof that he's real and he's around. But also, humans create culture and their characters and culture that persist, in one form or another, for centuries or millennia. And the fact that we develop folklore is us telling stories about ourselves, not necessarily about the characters in those stories. 

Adrian: Yeah, it's also this very funny kind of contagion logic, where basically, hearing about something at all, and I think this is where homosexuality and satanic panic all merge, because that's the sort of the obvious case I should have made earlier, the reason why I mentioned stat blocks for these demons is you fight them. The point is they're the enemy, right? Yes, there are right evil demonic rituals in D&D 99.9999% of the time you're supposed to stop it. That's the story, right? 

And this idea that oh, the kids will get the content independent of how it is being offered to them, I think is one that I, at least in the eighties, associate with drugs, right? There's no such thing as trying it. And I associate it with sexuality, right? This is how Christian conservatives tend to think about sexuality. And I think that's the other important point to make here, that basically, the way that Dungeons and Dragons plays with these tropes is in contrast to the White Hats, which are the people playing the game, right? And again, not in every case, it's a very open-ended game, but in the vast majority of cases, right? You're not playing as Sauron, you're playing as Frodo. 

Sarah: There's a lot of Satan in the Bible. Should you let your kids read the Bible, they might love Satan? I read a lot of the Bible as a kid, and that is where I got my sense of Satan as making a good point from time to time, so you can't stop learning. 

Adrian: Yeah, we'd have to ban Milton for sure.

Sarah: Sure, someone's tried that. But it also occurs to me that there's something very telling here in this idea of because there are things that you shouldn't try, right? I don't think that I need to try meth. I don't need to try anything that is highly addictive. And at this point, even party drugs are often laced with something that'll kill you and that's not fun. 

So the list of things you can try at college has gotten smaller, which is terrible. And it's not the fault of college students, but the idea of what if I try something and I like it and my identity reveals itself to me, and then I know who I am and I can't unknow it. And, yeah, it sucks to live in a culture that wants to deny you that because that's not fair. That's not control that parents can aspire to have over their children and yet a very central part of this seems to be exactly that. 

I don't know. I don't have kids. I know parenting is really hard. But I guess don't make it harder than it has to be. Let your kid be a nerd. This is my general advice for parents. If your kid is figuring out who they are, then that's exciting. 

Adrian: And on a more pragmatic level, if they can figure out how to make a D&D character, they can master TurboTax. So you’re good. 

Sarah: Ah, I love it. D&D was there all along. D&D will save us, unless it is too hard for your brain to focus on like mine, in which case you can do something else that will worry parents of the 80s.

Adrian: It's true. And it is one of those funny things that I feel like the 80s really have turned out to be eternal in ways, or the late 70s too, that in the way that we're doing the moral panics, but we also still have at least some of the cool hobbies we came up with at the time.

Sarah: What a journey this has been. And I guess, what have you been up to in D&D lately? 

Adrian: Ah, so currently I am running a game and we're actually not playing D&D at all. We decided after two and a half years to give it a rest, and we're now playing the British role playing game Warhammer. And so I'm currently doing that. And then I'm going to be joining a new campaign, I think, in August, hopefully. I'm very excited for that, too. 

Sarah: I'm excited for all of it. I'm excited for, I don't know, whatever people are doing lately that brings some joy. Yeah, thank you so much for this. 

Adrian: Thank you. Thank you for letting me talk your ear off about Dungeons and Dragons. 

Sarah: It's my favorite thing to give an ear to. And I know you already told us, but where can people find you if they want a little more of your work?

Adrian: Yes, so I have a substack, adriandaub.substack.com. You can follow my podcasts, The Feminist President and In Bed with the Right. And I would encourage everyone, if they enjoyed my animate versions about moral panics, to check out The Cancel Culture Panic, which comes out in September. 

Sarah: I'm very excited for that.

Adrian: Me too. I wrote the book initially in German. This is an English adaptation, not a translation. So I'm very excited to, after two years of people yelling at me in German to finally get yelled at in English. It's a huge step forward for me. I'm like, oh, that's nice. At least it's in English, too.

Sarah: I wish I knew enough about the German language to make a grammar joke, but I would just make a fool of myself. But I'm so happy for anyone who gets to write a book and be yelled at about it, but especially in two languages. It's just, what a triumph. Wow, we did it. We're imagining. We're using the most dangerous tool of all. 

Adrian: The imagination.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being with us in this long summertime. Thank you so much to Adrian Daub for being our wonderful guest. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing this episode. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode as always. And we will see you in two weeks.