From the June 25-July 1, 1986, edition of the Tucson Weekly: “Dungeons and Dragons: Playing With Fire?”
“Many of the fantasy and role-playing games are smack in the middle of the occult, and that’s the truth,” says Jack Gracie. Gracie is the spokesman for Tucson’s Christian Awareness Fellowship, a “non-profit interdenominational Christian group primarily devoted to educating the body of Christ concerning the cults and the occult.”
“In these games, kids are taught how to invoke demons and thinks like that. And now it has gone beyond a game.”
Gracie explains how he sees the development of “Satanism” among game players.
“There is really nothing wrong with a certain amount of fantasy,” he says. “It can be creative. But eventually it goes beyond the role-playing games. It gets to the point wehre kids are learning how to kill each other. The game has bushed beyond the Ken and Barbie scene. This stuff is really evil.”
—Tim Vanderpool, in a cover story exploring the hysteria over Dungeons and Dragons
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2011.
Satanism, back-masking (why did records always contain “evil” messages when played backwards and not “buy my next record” sales pitches?), leg warmers — did the 80’s really happen or was Big Pharma running a ginormous hallucinogen experiment via municipal water supplies?
You will find the answer in Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man”. Harold Hill’s con was to find out what was new in a town – new enough that most people had heard of it, but few really knew anything about it. For his fictional River City, IA, it was a pool table, for the country at this time, it was fantasy role-playing games. The lazy mass media, who never did any research into the truth, shortened it to D&D, or spelled out, generally with the correct ampersand replaced by the word – whether they were referring to the TSR product, or one of the many other role-playing games. Thus, with major scandal-mongering help from the media, the religious extremists who now rule this nation, made as much money as the game publishers did. This provided much of the seed money which permitted the recent takeover of the House of Repreesentatives and a majority of the state governments with racist, sexist, and anti-Constitutionalist (over 40 amendments so far proposed) politics. “They came for the gamers and I did nothing because I wasn’t a gamer…”
Paul Cardwell
Bonham, TX
903 583-9296