From Mazes and Monsters to Dark Dungeons, D&D was a lot scarier in the 1980s.
These days your life isn’t complete if you aren’t part of a role-playing gaming group, but it wasn’t that long ago that playing Dungeons & Dragons was seen as a surefire ticket to madness and damnation.
During the 1980s, D&D became associated with violence and idiot suicide, casting a spell over the media that resulted in some strident anti-fantasy propaganda.
The game became an instant hit among mid-70s “indoor kids,” who were looking for a fun way to exercise their imaginations and play around in a vast, complex world of magic and mystery. Unfortunately, that same desire for escape often goes hand-in-hand with depression and other feelings of isolation.
The catalyzing event that started the moral panic over D&D was the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in 1979. Egbert was a gifted computer programmer studying at Michigan State University, having been accepted at the age of 16. While at the school, he was involved with a D&D group that would sometimes do a little LARPing in the privacy of the university’s underground steam tunnels. Egbert disappeared into the steam tunnels in August of 1979, with the intention of committing suicide by overdosing on quaaludes.
Egbert’s family hired enterprising private detective William Dear to find their son. During his search, Dear learned of Egbert’s D&D hobby, and made it the focus of his investigation. Egbert’s disappearance came to be blamed on a “Dungeons and Dragons game gone awry.” Dear concluded the game had driven him mad, that he lost the ability to discern reality from fiction and had gone off on some insane, delusional quest. Of course when the media got wind of this, it planted the seeds of D&D as a corruptor of youth, and maybe even worse.
The controversy surrounding Dungeons & Dragons continued throughout the 1980s. When the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1989, TSR removed all mention of demons and devils, and skewed gameplay to more heroic actions as opposed to the more ambiguous tenor of the first edition. As the 1990s moved on, attention moved away from the evils of pen-and-paper roleplaying games, and focused on violent video games or other cultural boogeymen.
D&D eventually got its devils back, and enough room from its 1980s image to publish such great sourcebooks as The Book of Vile Darkness. However, in those circles where reference to Harry Potter and talk of fantasy violence is still seen as a ticket to the dark side, D&D is still the bad boy of roleplaying.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/th...ns-dragons
https://youtu.be/5hJdhL1Ni_w
These days your life isn’t complete if you aren’t part of a role-playing gaming group, but it wasn’t that long ago that playing Dungeons & Dragons was seen as a surefire ticket to madness and damnation.
During the 1980s, D&D became associated with violence and idiot suicide, casting a spell over the media that resulted in some strident anti-fantasy propaganda.
The game became an instant hit among mid-70s “indoor kids,” who were looking for a fun way to exercise their imaginations and play around in a vast, complex world of magic and mystery. Unfortunately, that same desire for escape often goes hand-in-hand with depression and other feelings of isolation.
The catalyzing event that started the moral panic over D&D was the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in 1979. Egbert was a gifted computer programmer studying at Michigan State University, having been accepted at the age of 16. While at the school, he was involved with a D&D group that would sometimes do a little LARPing in the privacy of the university’s underground steam tunnels. Egbert disappeared into the steam tunnels in August of 1979, with the intention of committing suicide by overdosing on quaaludes.
Egbert’s family hired enterprising private detective William Dear to find their son. During his search, Dear learned of Egbert’s D&D hobby, and made it the focus of his investigation. Egbert’s disappearance came to be blamed on a “Dungeons and Dragons game gone awry.” Dear concluded the game had driven him mad, that he lost the ability to discern reality from fiction and had gone off on some insane, delusional quest. Of course when the media got wind of this, it planted the seeds of D&D as a corruptor of youth, and maybe even worse.
The controversy surrounding Dungeons & Dragons continued throughout the 1980s. When the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1989, TSR removed all mention of demons and devils, and skewed gameplay to more heroic actions as opposed to the more ambiguous tenor of the first edition. As the 1990s moved on, attention moved away from the evils of pen-and-paper roleplaying games, and focused on violent video games or other cultural boogeymen.
D&D eventually got its devils back, and enough room from its 1980s image to publish such great sourcebooks as The Book of Vile Darkness. However, in those circles where reference to Harry Potter and talk of fantasy violence is still seen as a ticket to the dark side, D&D is still the bad boy of roleplaying.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/th...ns-dragons
https://youtu.be/5hJdhL1Ni_w
