Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Daub

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Dobb"

Podcast Information:

• Title: You're Wrong About
• Host/Author: Sarah Marshall
• Episode: Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Dobb
• Release Date: August 20, 2024

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I. Introduction

In this episode of You're Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall delves into one of the more bizarre aspects of the 1980s Satanic Panic: the fear surrounding the popular fantasy role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Joined by Adrian Dobb, a literary scholar, professor at Stanford University, and co-host of Embed with the Right, the discussion explores how D&D became a focal point for parental anxiety and moral panic during the era.

Notable Quote:

Sarah Marshall [00:00]: "I'm going to start a panic about Clue Teaching Kids to commit murder."

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II. The Satanic Panic and Dungeons & Dragons

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s was characterized by widespread fears of satanic ritual abuse and cult activities infiltrating everyday institutions like schools and daycare centers. While much of the panic centered on the insidious infiltration of daycare workers into preschools, another significant yet ludicrous target was the seemingly innocuous game, Dungeons & Dragons.

Adrian Dobb explains:

Adrian Dobb [03:58]: "It's 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."

The crux of the panic was the belief that D&D could sever teenagers from reality, leading them into devil worship and other nefarious activities. This perception was fueled by a combination of media sensationalism, personal tragedies, and the inherent misunderstandings about the game's nature.

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III. The James Dallas Egbert III Case

A pivotal event that propelled D&D into the Satanic Panic spotlight was the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979 from Michigan State University. Egbert, a highly intelligent 16-year-old who had graduated high school at 13, was an avid D&D player. His disappearance was sensationally linked to the game when a private investigator, Bill Deer, speculated that Egbert might have ventured into the university's steam tunnels to engage in a lone live-action role-playing (LARP) session.

Adrian Dobb [16:36]:

"So, I do think it starts with James Dallas Egbert III. I think there are earlier cases, but this is sort of really the one where it captures the imagination."

Although Egbert was later found alive, tragically, he died by suicide in August 1980. This heartbreaking outcome was misconstrued by the media and concerned parents as evidence of D&D's corrosive influence, overshadowing other factors like Egbert's personal struggles and undisclosed issues.

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IV. Media Amplification: "Mazes and Monsters" and 60 Minutes

The novel "Mazes and Monsters" by Rona Jaffe and its subsequent 1982 TV movie adaptation starring Tom Hanks further entrenched the association between D&D and real-world dangers. The story portrayed a group of college friends whose intense involvement in D&D leads one of them to lose touch with reality, culminating in dangerous consequences.

Sarah Marshall [23:58]:

"And in Mazes and Monsters, we have this quartet of college friends, and I feel like one of them is kind of modeled on James Dallas Egbert III."

Additionally, a pivotal 1985 60 Minutes report spotlighted Pat Pulling, a mother who became a leading crusader against D&D after her son's suicide. Her campaign was instrumental in legitimizing fears about D&D, despite the game's minimal actual involvement in such tragedies.

Adrian Dobb [35:42]:

"So, pulling very much is sort of, as I say, drawing on the sort of TV violence sort of template in her campaign."

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V. Pat Pulling and the BADD Movement

Pat Pulling emerged as one of the most vocal figures linking D&D to Satanic activities. In 1983, she founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD), an organization dedicated to investigating and condemning the game. Pulling's arguments often intertwined D&D with themes of witchcraft, drug use, and other societal fears, using personal tragedy as anecdotal evidence to support her claims.

Adrian Dobb [42:36]:

"Pat Pulling, I feel like, is, to me, such an interesting figure within the satanic panic, generally, because you have somebody who had, you know, a teenager who died by suicide."

Pulling's efforts were amplified by her appearances on national television, most notably the aforementioned 60 Minutes segment, which portrayed her narrative as a cautionary tale of D&D's purported dangers.

Notable Quote:

Pat Pulling in 60 Minutes [49:24]: "She says my son was cursed."

However, critical analysis reveals that D&D was more of a scapegoat than the actual cause of such incidents, with underlying issues like mental health and societal pressures often being the true culprits.

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VI. The Cultural Profile of D&D Players

To bolster her campaign, Pat Pulling outlined a specific profile of the "typical" D&D player, reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices that marginalized certain groups of adolescents.

Adrian Dobb [42:30]:

"Profile of participants. First, usually very intelligent. Two, creative. Three, 95% of the players are male, with the majority being Caucasian. ... Six, physically either fairly slight build, clean cut, or possibly overweight and sloppy appearance."

This profiling often intersected with homophobic and classist biases, portraying creative and intelligent youth—especially those exploring their sexual identities—as susceptible to darker influences.

Notable Quote:

Sarah Marshall [42:55]: "This is a gay panic, right? They're like, we're going after the creative children now."

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VII. D&D's Corporate Journey and Resilience

Despite the widespread panic and negative media portrayal, TSR, the company behind D&D, experienced tremendous commercial success. Revenues soared, and the game's popularity continued to climb, illustrating a classic Streisand effect where attempts to suppress or discredit the game only amplified its allure among youth.

Adrian Dobb [52:44]:

"But like this was a structural problem."

TSR's ability to continuously innovate—releasing various editions, expanding game settings, and embracing multimedia adaptations—helped D&D not only survive but thrive amidst the controversy. Furthermore, the company's engagement with corporate entities like Wizards of the Coast and later Hasbro ensured the game's enduring presence in popular culture.

Notable Quote:

Adrian Dobb [55:45]: "One counterfactual I sometimes think about is like, what if D&D had not become big business... would that have been far scarier?"

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VIII. Reflections and Modern Implications

Drawing parallels between the 1980s Satanic Panic and contemporary moral panics, Sarah Marshall and Adrian Dobb discuss how fear and misunderstanding continue to target subcultures and hobbies today. The episode emphasizes the cyclical nature of moral panics—how society often scapegoats emerging cultural phenomena without substantial evidence.

Adrian Dobb [32:05]:

"But now it's like we are saying out loud, ... we're aligning Satan with like, your child having a queer teacher or like your child ever hearing about anything to do with anything, you know, gender queerness, gayness..."

This reflection underscores the importance of critical thinking and the dangers of allowing unfounded fears to dictate societal attitudes toward creative and imaginative endeavors.

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IX. Conclusion

The episode wraps up with Adrian Dobb sharing his current engagements in the role-playing community and providing resources for listeners interested in exploring his work further. Sarah Marshall underscores the resilience of D&D and the lessons learned from the Satanic Panic era.

Notable Quotes:

Adrian Dobb [67:09]: "If they can figure out how to make a D&D character, they can master TurboTax."

Sarah Marshall [67:37]: "Well, what a journey this has been. And I guess. What have you been up to in D&D lately?"

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Final Thoughts:

"Dungeons & Dragons & The Satanic Panic with Adrian Dobb" offers a comprehensive look into how a beloved game was entangled in one of America's most infamous moral panics. Through insightful dialogue and historical analysis, Sarah Marshall and Adrian Dobb shed light on the interplay between media, corporate interests, and societal fears, providing valuable lessons on understanding and resisting unwarranted moral panics.

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Where to Find More:

• Adrian Dobb's Substack: adriendob.substack.com
• Podcasts: Embed with the Right and The Feminist Present
• Upcoming Book: Cancel Culture Panic (Release Date: September)

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm going to start a panic about Clue Teaching Kids to commit murder.

[Michael Hobbes]

Welcome to youo'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 Dobb, co host of Embed 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, severing 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 kind of 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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome to youo're Wrong about the Podcast, where from the beginning we've been talking about the Satanic Panic and today we are talking about the role playing game aspect of it. And we were talking about it with Adrian Dobb. Adrian, hello.

[Adrian Dobb]

Hi.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

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. Yeah, I've been back for a couple of days.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you leave this country alone for five minutes. And the things we got up to.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, I know. And I mean, who knows when this will air? But like, yeah, you've definitely been keeping me in suspense.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. It's safe to say that when this comes out will not be in a more normal place.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Fill in the blank.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's a Mad Lib. It's can you believe that Lindsey Graham was caught in flagrante delicto with his ant farm? And it's like, yeah, I believe that.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And what else do you do when you're not talking to me on this show?

[Adrian Dobb]

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, embed 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 Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

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 sort of the moral panic that I watched sort of take shape as I was engaging in the behavior everyone was freaking out about, which, you know, is not every moral panic, but it's certainly something that I feel like gives one a really, really interesting and acute view of, like, how these things come together. Right. Like, wait, I do these things and I don't think I'm getting into Satanism. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, yeah, that's what you think. That's what Satan wants you to think.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know that's what Big Satan is trying to get me to accept. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

The internal memos that were leaked from Big Satan. Yeah. You know, so central to the satanic panic, of course is like panic over kids. But it's so interesting to look at 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, well, sometimes a lake is formed by a river and sometimes a river is formed by many smaller tributaries. 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 and particularly adolescents. And I feel like that's where we get into your territory.

[Adrian Dobb]

That's exactly right. I do think that like 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. Which like the panic around trans kids, which ends up kind of being about these people who transition in their 20s. And you're like, I'm sorry, when does someone stop being a child?

[Sarah Marshall]

45.

[Adrian Dobb]

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, honestly I tried to research this as much as I could. It's unclear to me how successful D and D was at which age bracket. I'll have a little bit more to say about that maybe later. But like, it does appear to have been kind of a college phenomenon as well. Meaning it then becomes really, really hard to kind of yell about it because like, well, 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 Marshall]

Like 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 Dobb]

Yeah, happy to explain that a little bit.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

It outlived Roe v Wade. Congrats.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, my God. Yeah. I mean, basically it grew out of sort of tactical war gaming like Risk.

[Sarah Marshall]

Although I don't know if that existed yet.

[Adrian Dobb]

That did exist, but no, this is a little bit more involved. This is the kind of stuff where people build like terrain and like measurements with like 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 found 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 and D, other systems referred to as the Storyteller or the Game Master. Someone has to kind of mind the world, someone has to kind of present what these individual players and their characters are encountering and then everyone else at the table embodies one character. Right. And so in a typical D and D game, that'll be 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's playing the elf and the other person's playing a Dwarven warrior, you know, you can have a repartee, you can decide that they have an animosity or a deep friendship and have that inflect how you play the game. So it's kind of a mix between a tactical game and kind of collaborative storytelling. Really.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And kind of like improv as well, maybe.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, it can be. Certainly, you know, 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, you know, if someone says, like, I want to convince a city guard that they should let us in without paying customs or whatever. Right. Like, you could have a dungeon master who says, like, okay, roll a die. We'll find out whether you that 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, really 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, like, where you have to decide ahead of time, like, 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 50s and they've been playing since they were teens. And I'm sure they're not playing the same game that 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, you know, years or even decades apart.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I love that. And I guess, you know, for full disclosure on my background, I have played D and D a couple times with friends, and I enjoyed parts of it. And also just, I think, have like, the wrong attention span for games. Like, there are not that many games I play consistently in my life when I had, like 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 sort of 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 play for them to exist in.

[Adrian Dobb]

Absolutely. And I mean, I think you're already hitting on two key points here. I think one is the game is extremely long. It's potentially endless.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

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, like, you know, part of the fun is collectively telling a story as a group over weeks and sometimes years. I had a D and D game that ran for a year and a half until we decided, okay, I think the story is now over, right. Every week we'd meet and keep playing and the group then just met the next week and started a new story basically. The other thing that I think D and D is famous for and that often it turns people off, let's say, is that the rule books are just enormous. Right? Like 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 foliance of rules that like I can't make heads or tails of. And then they like mumble to each other and talk for hours and hours in our sweat smelly basement, right? And like 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 picking order. And obviously logging a 300 page rulebook and a 20 sided die across a schoolyard is not like the number one way to avoid bullying. Right? So I think that it has this, it has this real. You nichify yourself by playing these games. You're not, at least you didn't used to be sort of someone who, who made a lot of connections. It's rather you found the other freaks who loved this stuff and sat down with them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. I don't know, it feels like culturally as well because like adults respond to peer pressured too, it turns out.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like it feels like the kind of child that people are pressured to want to have is like impossible. It's the impossible child, Penrose's impossible child. Where it's like perfectly rule abiding, not rebellious, but also not a nerd or anything.

[Adrian Dobb]

Right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I don't even. Are we talking about a budding serial killer or what?

[Adrian Dobb]

Right, exactly. And I mean cynically you could say this was the panic that eventually set in over fantasy role playing games was the way to like make sure you worried about every fucking kid in America. Right? Like, like it's like, oh, does your kid do drugs? No, he sits in our basement, right. Oh, does he not read? Oh no, he reads all the time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, but is he reading too much or the wrong things?

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

And it's like, wow, imagine reading a thick book about ancient times and epic battles. I know, sounds non Christian to me. I mean, come on.

[Adrian Dobb]

I'm sorry. Like, I think you're just raising a nerd man here. Like there is a kind of anxiety that attaches to the way children play in general, but there is also kind of like a way in which American capitalism kind of starts sort of realizing, hey, we can actually get kids to buy a whole lot more games if we tell them, hey, your parents are going to hate this shit. Right? And that definitely was true of D and D, right. Like, you know, 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 like they really felt themselves to be under assault. The people who made this game. On the other hand, while all that is true, I invite your listeners to think about the fact that they are printing money at the same time. Like it's the ultimate Streisand effect, right? Like, because it's like this is the game parents hate and like every 15 year old's like, say no more, take my $20, you know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And I'm sure that it, you know, that it has some scary ramifications, but also, yeah. That it is incredible free advertising. And like we are still advertising it because it's not just. I mean, I'm sure that this did spill over into other games, but like we all know that Dungeons and Dragons is the satanic panic game, right? I'm going to start a panic about Clue.

[Adrian Dobb]

That's right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Teaching kids to commit murder. Well, I wonder where does the panic part of the story start? Does it come from many directions or is there a central figure in all this who kind of gets it rolling?

[Adrian Dobb]

So I do think it starts with James Dallas Egbert iii. I think there are earlier cases, but this is sort of really the one where it captures the imagination. So maybe I'll give you just a little bit of a timeline. So TSR is founded in lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 1973. It's basically in Gary Gygax's basement, I think. I think the building today is a D and D museum, in fact. So the first edition of D and D, I think is 74 and it's something like a thousand copies. And it Sells out immediately. In 1977, they release advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which sort of like, I think super kickstarts this.

[Sarah Marshall]

And then in 1979, theoretical dungeons and Dragons.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, it's like. Yeah, it's. Well, I mean, it gave a wonderful community episode its title, so there's that. But it gives you kind of a sense of just how quickly this explodes. Like, there's two different versions of this game suddenly, and it's selling just like hotcakes. I mean, it's. I don't know the exact numbers, but.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, but it's kind of 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 Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it seems like a great thing to, like, stay up all night playing, you know?

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

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's a private investigator, Bill Deer, 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 Deer sort of floats to the media this theory, which I don't think he originates. Like, there are other people who've suggested this, that Egbert might have headed into the tunnels in order to kind of do what we today would call a larp, a live action role playing around his D and D campaign, 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 sort of the media fixates on the fact that he's this avid D and D player. He's a 16 year old. He's just absolutely brilliant. Graduated high school at 13, started college at 14. Right. Which also gets, at this point you were making earlier that, like, he's the kind of kid you want and now he's missing. Right. And like, so, like, all the pieces are here for you to get to worry about the kids who are not smoking dope. Well, it turns out he was also smoking dope, but, like, they did not know that then.

[Sarah Marshall]

Kids contain multitudes.

[Adrian Dobb]

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, like, hey, can you come pick me up?

[Sarah Marshall]

Bill Dear is like, thank God I was about to find you, by the way.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, I know, right? Like, he. He writes this entire book about, like, his, like, genius moves, and 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 Marshall]

Call off the day early and hit the links at that point.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, I know, Right. But so the story importantly, Dear kind of 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. 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 and D, it all sort of gets bunched together. And until 1984, when Deer writes this book, he sort of never disputes this. Right. He heavily milked the D and 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 a 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, well, older men, probably gay men, Right. Who didn't want to be tangled up with this kind of case to begin with. Right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

And so basically, Dear kind of keeps the homosexuality angle and the drug angle out of the coverage mostly. And that means D and D, it's all about dnd, Right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. And that has to stand in for everything else in a way. Right?

[Adrian Dobb]

Exactly. Right. Like, I mean, like, it turns out there were things about James Dallas Egbert that his parents didn't know. But D and D was only the half of it, Right. Like, it really had to do with. With other things that, you know, are very tragic and tell us a lot about those sort of late 70s. But it is. The game was really ancillary to that, seems. And even when he releases the book in 1984, he calls it the Dungeon Master, Right. Like, he plays up the D and D angle, Right. Like, the letter that they send out to publicists are all about, like, here's some press clippings from the time about D and D and about rumors of witch cults, drug Rings, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Like, and then if you read the book, he's like, yeah, no, that kind of wasn't it.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 know, you have to make it this other story.

[Adrian Dobb]

Exactly. Right. I mean, not that, you know, we have to blame deer exclusively here, because by 1981, you have also the amazing novel Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe, a absolute stone cold classic of the genre.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's also like, 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, these are two very. Would seem to be two very different genres. And yet, you know, she did it. She's like Isaac Asimov.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, well, allegedly. She wrote the book really, really fast, which, like, having reread it really, really fast over the last weekend, like, I would definitely believe.

[Sarah Marshall]

It'S like how Ray Parker Jr. Wrote Ghostbusters in, like, half an hour. You're like, yeah. Yes, I believe that.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. It's like, check checks out. So. And just to give you a sense of, like, how this notoriety sort of, like, is interacting with DND success, so the same year the novel comes out, TSR Hobbies has, according to Wikipedia, revenues of 12.9 million and 130 people on payroll. Like, that's. It's a juggernaut. Right. And then we get a. Get a TV movie, movie of the week on CBS in 1982 called Mazes and Monsters, pretty faithful to the book starring the one and only Tom Hanks. Yeah. Have you. Have you seen this thing? Have you seen this thing?

[Sarah Marshall]

I have watched it. Yeah. I watched it with my friend Jenna a few years ago, and I remember being very charmed by it. Yeah. And in Mazes and Monsters, we have this quartet of college friends, and I feel like one of them is kind of modeled on James Dallas Egbert. Like, he's young to be in college. He seems, you know, 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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you're like, I did not see that coming.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. It's an odd one, I think, like, as far as moral panic movies goes, it's not actually that panicky. Right. Like, there's no sort of seducer who's.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, there's no Satan in it.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. It's like, hey, kids, want to try some D and D? Right? Like, there's none of that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Adrian Dobb]

It's basically just a bunch of damaged youngsters, more or less sort of unraveling.

[Sarah Marshall]

Together, like you'll find in any college. Because that's what colleges is, where you recover from the trauma of whatever you dealt with at home. Partly.

[Adrian Dobb]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

It just doesn't seem like getting stuck in a game is. It doesn't come up very much, you know, or it's like, if it does, then, like, it's not because of the game.

[Adrian Dobb]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. I mean, it's. I feel like Mazes and Monsters is trying to be a drug movie.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah, totally. Wow. Yeah. For a movie of the week premise, it's pretty good. But then when it gets more political, you're like, oh, no.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, it sort of makes its way into the mainstream. I mean, I would say CBS Movie of the week is pretty mainstream. It gets sort of mixed in there. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of people watched those. Like, I realized that TV movies now are the sort of. You know, they feel kind of distant, and we watch them and they feel like. I mean, 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 I mean, this is one that people know and remember to some extent.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if for no other reason than it was, I think, Tom Hanks first starring role or first role, maybe.

[Sarah Marshall]

Even loved 80s Tom Hanks.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. And then 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 sort of start this kind of explicitly Christian crusade against D and D. This is the group with the amazing acronym bad. B, A D, D. I love it. Bothered About Dungeons and dragons, founded in 1983, I believe.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're bad. They're bad. They're really, really bad. Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

And the same year, again, like, that Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons starts. It's also when the famous D and D Saturday morning cartoon debuts on cbs. Right? What?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God, I forgot this hat. Oh, yes.

[Adrian Dobb]

Oh, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

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 DND novels. And that becomes a big, big thing throughout, I think, the 80s and 90s. And it is fun fact how I learned English.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's so cool.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, they're quite readable. It turns out, you know, they're not. I mean, 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 Marshall]

I read there were Clue books that I read. And in retrospect, I'm like, how could you even ring a book out? I know 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 Dobb]

At least one clue. We must have at least one clue. Like, I mean, I sort of talked earlier about, like, oh, well, you know, walking into a D and D game can be a little baffling. Like, I do wonder how many parents really walked into D and D games at all, because it's hard to schedule one of these things. Like, it really.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

I can see why people in college are able to do it because, like, you know, they got fuck all to do.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

I know. And, you know, where everyone lives, you can just knock on their door. In middle school, like, me and my friends, like, played very little. What we did was we read collectively, right? We drew up characters, we made maps, we generated, you know, adventures. We read the novels and talked about them. Right? Like, ultimately, this wasn't so much like 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 Marshall]

Yeah, well. And I feel like there's like, an element of this, of just, like, kids, like, being into something.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't know. I feel like there's a. To some degree, it's like nature abhors a vacuum. Like, kids want to have big enthusiasms about stuff.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. And I think that as the hobby has aged, too, like, I think that some of these things have changed. We can talk about, like, what ultimately. Because the satanic panic did not do in tsr, TSR sort of died in the most hilarious way possible. Sort of of its own success.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, that'll happen.

[Adrian Dobb]

But there is this kind of, like, in 1984 or 80, or maybe even 1990, if you walked into a game store, the first thing you would have been struck by would have been, it's like, how many options there were and how many ways to play D and D. There was a kind of part of what it was selling you was the infinity of time. Like, you're young. You have all the time in the world. Why not buy this and try that too? Right. And like, anyone actually trying to do any of these things and realize them at the game table would have, I think, found that they had overbought horribly. But, like, that was not the point. The point was this kind of limitlessness. And I think in that way, it is, like, the measurelessness of, like, childhood reading. The way that, like, yeah, people can consume just intense numbers of formulaically written YA novels, like, in a row. Right. This is what this is. It's. There's a part of the fun is, like, the fact that you hope you could do it forever.

[Sarah Marshall]

How old were you when you first discovered D and D? And I, you know, aside from that, like, what else drew you to it? What did you love about it? Or, you know, what do you continue to love?

[Adrian Dobb]

I think I was. I was eight or nine, I would say, would be my guess. Although, you know, 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. It didn't involve. You'd have to be physical. It involved intense kind of bonding, sharing that with other people. Like, spending that much time with other people is a fun thing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

That felt different from, like, team sports or whatever.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's interesting, too 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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's like, we gotta just accept that that's not gonna work for all kids, you know.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. It's noticeable. Right. Like, the question of sexuality sort of threads through a lot of this early stuff. And like. Yeah. And I was a gay kid in the 1980s. Like, I think I'm not the only one who basically, I think, gravitated towards the make believe side of things. I think that there's a connection there. And I think parents probably accurately sense that that like the kid that was withdrawing from them for the game might be withdrawing from them in other ways. But they didn't, you know, 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 Marshall]

Right. Well, and something I was thinking about in terms of like the satanic panic then and now, you know, 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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And now it's like we are saying out loud, you know, we're not just going to blame Satan generally. Like, we are being very clear in aligning Satan with like, your child having a queer teacher or like your child ever hearing about anything to do with anything, you know, gender queerness, gayness, any of it that's satanic. And I think that 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 Dobb]

I think that's right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Or, you know, 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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

So I don't know if that's an improvement.

[Adrian Dobb]

Well, I mean, certainly what it was 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 like. And I think this is a way to, like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

To have a concern without having to admit what Your concern might be. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 Dobb]

Yeah, yeah. A little light in the D20. Yeah. In the Christian right. Freak out about D and D. Right. Homosexuality is still part of the litany. Right. Like, it involves Satanism, bestiality, homosexuality, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Like, 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 there is a. That's still percolating sort of in the background. But, like, people know better than to, like, lead with it. This can make your kids gay. Like, that's in there. But, like, people are too smart to sort of say that out loud.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. And then that can be sort of the more acceptable face of the fear that you can then sort of slip exactly whatever else you want into, like, you know, stuffing a turkey.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Adrian Dobb]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, if I'm a lawyer in 1984, I got a. Just grasp whatever straws I can lay hold to.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

They were initially gonna go with the big defense. And then they're like, no, I think that the D and D defense is better.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, D and D defense is better.

[Adrian Dobb]

And he presents two expert witnesses at trial, Pat Pulling and this guy Thomas Radecki, who is sort of part of the bothered about D and D crowd as well. And he writes this, like, long essay, Darren Molitor, that is full of Bible quotes, explaining basically how the game took hold of his mind. And so I think that kind of. That sort of kickstarts the whole thing. In 1985, we get that 60 Minutes report, which basically is all about Pat Pulling. Like, she's both the expert and the concerned parent that Bill Whitaker mostly interacts with. Yeah. So she really is key in kind of like pushing this kind of concerned about TV violence script onto this game that, like, you know, does contain some violence and has some violent imagery on its covers, but, like, is ultimately right, like, tame compared to it's A pretty.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

Right. So pulling very much is sort of, as I say, drawing on the sort of TV violence sort of template in her campaign. But she also does something that I know, you know quite well from the Satanic panic. She starts going to police departments, and that's where we start getting just like a bunch of false positives, basically. It's this very strange kind of vicious cycle that the kind of Satanism crusaders and cops sort of entered in the mid-80s where basically they receive training. And then like, every time someone does something violent, they're like, oh, could there be a Dungeon Master's guide somewhere in there within 20 yards of this person? Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like, and it's like, maybe, but it's not the first thing I'd look at.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, exactly. Just to give you one example, in 1985, there's the case of James Allen Kirby, which is basically sort of a proto Columbine style shooting in Kansas. And, like, in hindsight, it seems that, like, the D and D played very little role in this at all. But, like, the police kind of report it every time because, like, they. Oh, this is the thing from the seminar with that nice lady. Right. So this is a very, very, very common thing. It sort of enters into kind of like. Like the criminal justice discourse, basically.

[Sarah Marshall]

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, you know, cops going around the country, you know, and other kind of interested people like Pat Pulling, giving presentations to local police departments. Or, you know, if you look at newspapers from the 80s, there will often be, like, coming up at the community center learning to recognize Satanism and give these talks around the US and starting to spill into other countries eventually. But you just get this network of cops talking to other cops, all sharing the same handful of stories, but them circulating so much that it feels like more than it is. Which is essentially how schoolyard rumors happen.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, and they're kind of acting like the very children they claim to be so concerned about. But they have guns.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. And they then keep getting interviewed. Right. And so, like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. 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 you feel it is. Like, I feel like everyone is drinking espresso martinis without me, and that can't be true.

[Adrian Dobb]

Right. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things happening here. Right. On the one hand, you get these kind of. Of the Christian right, which is also, I think, sort of starting to make inroads into school boards, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, a lot of these ideas sort of are starting to enter the mainstream, and they need kind of good stalking horses, and D and 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 kind of, well, not quite false positives, but its own positives. Right. Pat Pulling will at some point sort of claimed that, like 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 and D played a role. What she means is that someone found DND paraphernalia near. Not on the person, but like in the possession of the person doing the thing. Right, Right. And I mean, this is at a time when there's 3 to 4 million kids playing DND across the United States. Right. So you're going to get these kinds of numbers, Right. Like, you're going to get some numbers. Some kids out of those 3 to 4 million are going to harm themselves or others.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Like 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 like, 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, right, who have committed murders recently who had listened to Taylor Swift at some time before the murder. But, like, are those related phenomena? You know, probably not. I realize some people really hate Taylor Swift and we get excited about that idea, but. Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

Well, the other thing to think about, of course, is that, like, the Satanism or cult angle, as you were pointing out, kind of becomes necessary to kind of keep this whole thing Going right.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's kind of thin.

[Adrian Dobb]

That's the thing. Like once you think about it as a hobby, it's like, well, yeah, I mean, like this kid may have once owned a player handbook and they may not have played for like three years, but that's not how they treat it. It's basically. It's the logic of the drug narrative where it is only down, down, down, down, down, right? Which is like a very 80s narrative. Right? The idea that like someone might enjoy playing a campaign, then decide it's lame or move house or join a sports team or whatever. Right. Like that doesn't occur to people that like, just because you have at some point had a hobby, doesn't you are not then like 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 like, yeah, like a drug or like a cult. Like you will get sucked in further and further. Which I'm sure there are people who, you know, like myself, who got really into it. But like, I can tell you that like 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 like if they did something like, I don't know how associated they were with D and 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? Yes. So here's a list from Pat Pulling's book, oh boy, the Devil's Web, which comes out in 89. It's a good title, 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. Three, 95% of the players are male, with the majority being Caucasian. Four, imaginative, adventurous. Five, academically interested in history or computer science with a high math aptitude and or an interesting in drama. Six, physically either fairly slight build, clean cut, or possibly overweight and sloppy appearance.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

I know, it's like, leave the drama kids alone, dude. Seven, usually socioeconomically from a middle to upper class, middle class family. Right? So like this is. We're covering the people that like you couldn't do, like teenage truancy or, you know, heavy metal, whatever. Like, they don't have tattoos, so you can't do the whole Satanism thing.

[Sarah Marshall]

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, like, an excuse to be stressed about, generally.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, exactly. It gets even better. 8. Generally, the adolescent D and D player is not involved with drugs.

[Sarah Marshall]

Cool. Is your child taking drugs? If they're not, they could be playing D and D, so you better give him some drugs.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. 9. Adolescents who become heavily involved generally are, quote, good kids with no prior behavioral problems.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's just, what are the signs? Well, if they have no prior behavioral problems, that is a red flag.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, there is like a side to this where you could say, like, okay, so, like, for. As a counterexample in early literature, especially about anorexia and eating disorders in the 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. It's like, yeah, 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, like, how do we pathologize?

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

A kid just sort of existing.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah, yeah. I think that in the end, what made this catch on was simply that. And maybe this is like too much armchair sociology, but, like, this is the latchkey generation. Like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

This is Gen X. I think the idea that parents just. They were more parts of children's lives that were inaccessible to their parents. Right, right. And that businesses, including tsr, were moving into the gap that was opening up. I think that that's fair. Right? Like, yeah, you know, in a way, it was capitalism all along, but, like.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, it's fair to be worried about a corporation parenting for you. It's just. Yeah, there Are a few others in line in front of Gary Gygax's?

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. Gyges of the World. Yes. Yeah. It's like a fear of, like, your kids might be reading. I mean, like, you get some version of this, right. Like, this joke in Stranger Things. Right. Where, like, the parents think their kids are playing D and D and the kids are, like, saving the world. Right. Like, and, like, the absolute inability to, like, understand any what's going on under their roof, like, that's getting at something. And, of course, you know, in a lot of the rumpus rooms in which the kids around 13, 14 started playing D and D, they eventually, like, would get high, you know, when they were 17. Right. So, like, it does live in that kind of space where parental supervision sort of starts slackening. And I think that is what made this kind of spark fly over. Why, you know, people who, like you manifestly, should not listen to, like, Pat Pulling could get the ear of the Good folks at 60 Minutes. Right. And, like, have them kind of, like, take this pretty seriously.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Well. And Pat Pulling, I feel like, is, to me, such an interesting figure within the satanic panic, generally, because you have somebody who had, you know, a teenager who died by suicide.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which is one of the worst things I can imagine, you know, just in terms of personal grief and.

[Adrian Dobb]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And, like, I do not hold those people to the kind of standard that I hold 60 minutes to.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And when you grieve, like, you often really want a quest, Like, I really identify with that experience of, like, it is 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, actually a case of, like, people, I think, like, not having a cynical bone in their body, but just happening to drop a match on a room full of perfectly crispy hay. Right. What are your thoughts about her having, you know, kind of dove into this particular part of the panic lately?

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. So, I mean, it's definitely. It's deeply tragic, and it's very clear that she's kind of trying to give a name to the feeling that she didn't know her son as well as she thought she did. And, I mean, as a parent myself, I find that that seems deeply tragic to me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

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.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

I mean, there's two ways of reading that. Like, either the kids are being so secretive or you can read it as saying, well, maybe it wasn't that important to them. They just happened to own this game.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

Or we could say, well, maybe that was. It's just a parse prototo for like a bunch of stuff that, like, yeah, 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 son, but a lot of these kids also turned out to be gay. So, like, you know, the fact that like they, they contain an entire cosmos that they couldn't share with their parents, like, that's a horrible thing to find out. And I think DND is the name that they ended up giving that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

But as you say, like there is, because you were mentioning the responsibility of the media and like, 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 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 Whitaker again, the curse that was placed on Binks's D and D character that day. Right. So, like, he takes what she's saying. She's saying my son was cursed. Right. And he takes that. Right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

And it's like, oh, this was a. He couldn't understand what was happening. He mistook a in game curse for real. Right. No. So is she right? Like, not only are you putting a grieving parent on tv.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

You're also like trying to reframe what is obviously kind of a loss of reality.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbes]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Because grief is really the trip that makes you lose touch with reality for a while or one of them.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. And then you reframe it into this kind of like concern trolley thing. Like, that's not what she's saying. She's saying, yeah, 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 like, oh, can kids not tell fiction from realities? Like Your supposed experts can't. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And you know, speaking of like the United States of projection, this is, you know, 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. Yeah. That we have adults having this basic existential debate over what is real and then accusing their kids of that. In a way.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. And I mean, there's also, of course, the old just worry about who's teaching your children. Right. Like the Devil's Webster subtitle is who's stalking your children for Satan. Pat Pulling too, in the, in that 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. What 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 like this idea that, like, oh, they're learning these kinds of patterns of behavior. Right. To me, like there's a kind of a residual sort of anti communist imagination there. Right. Like, yeah, but there is also, like my kids behaving in ways that I don't recognize. Right. Like, it's like, you know, someone must be modifying their behavior because they were such a sweet kid. Right. Like, it's just. There's a lot of mid-80s cope in what is admittedly is horribly tragic, tragic story.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, it kind of 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 Dobb]

Right. The other expert quoted in the 60 minutes is Thomas Radecki, who sort of. Well, he claims to be from the University of Illinois Medical School. That turned out not to be the case. He's sort of 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. So 1980. 85. You know, again, like, that seems, as the game designer Michael Stackpole will point out in a report on Radeki and pulling in 1989. Like, it would mean that statistically D and D players are far less likely to do any of these things than other kids.

[Sarah Marshall]

Probably just Two numbers passing each other in the night. Yeah, yeah. Well, and what kind of effect does this have on like people playing D and D at this time? You know, are there scary consequences for.

[Adrian Dobb]

Some of them 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 sort of forbidden, etc, etc. But by and large, the story of DND in the 1980s is one of endless success. That is to say, the novels, you know, are on bestseller lists. The books keep selling out again, like, biggest Streisand effect ever. Right. Like kids gravitate towards this hobby more than than they might have if there hadn't been all this press attention paid to it. Starting in the late 80s, I think, 1988, you start getting D and D video games which introduce a whole nother generation to the world of D and D. Yeah, 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. Well, there are a bunch of things that go wrong. They appear to be not business geniuses, sort of like an interesting through line. Gary Gygax, in fact, got fired from the company in 1985 after kind of a Hollywood sojourn that appears to have involved just like starlets and Coke, basically.

[Sarah Marshall]

Will success spoil Gary Gygax?

[Adrian Dobb]

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 of it. That is to say, right, 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 1000 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 and D books for all this, right? And it sort of didn't occur to them that 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, right? And to just give you a sense, like, right, like 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 like some handouts for players. Right. Like people can play something like that for six months easily, maybe for a year. Like I'm guiding my players through a campaign. I would say it's a 200 page book and we're maybe three months in. Right. And they put out like hundreds of these a year. Right. No one could possibly get through any of it. And more to the point, of all those millions, three to four million players, only really one out of five, namely the Dungeon Master, has to own any of this shit.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

And that's why it's satanic.

[Adrian Dobb]

And this is something they still struggle with. TSR was bought by Wizards of the coast who make the Gathering, which in turn was bought by Hasbro. The fine folks at Hasbro. And they're still struggling with this. Like, how do we market this, this object? We're like, we're like, oh, just use your imagination. It's like, oh, cool, so I don't have to buy anything more like, oh. Starting to see how the money making part of this was undercooked by us.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. 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, you know, certain tenets. Right. If you're raising them to be obedient to not just a religion necessarily, but just like 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 you kind of control is slipping in that way. But I like, even better this window into like. Oh, right. 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 Dobb]

Yeah. The fact that like, you know, 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 mean, I think things sold well, but like, this was a structural problem.

[Sarah Marshall]

They taught a man to fish and now he's fishing. They're like, we got, we made you another fish. Kit. And he's like, no, I'm good. And so is this a case of like 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, like not ever admitting they made a mistake, but just kind of like backing off of it because people don't care as much anymore or like, it becomes like its popularity wanes and then it doesn't feel like so much of a threat.

[Adrian Dobb]

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

[Sarah Marshall]

I like that part.

[Adrian Dobb]

Then you have the fact that these were corporate entities, unlike big daycare, and they knew how to fight back, right? Like these, these were people who are making money doing this. They were not big faceless corporation, but, like, 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 of out there pushing back, sort of trying to explain, like, why this is bunk. And then I think it really helped that like, a lot of the people carrying the panic were just such utter cranks and weirdos. Right? And that like, you know when you have your television violence guy on 60 Minutes being like, I heard from parents that saw their child summon a D and D demon into his room before he killed himself. 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, like, that's part of it too, that it was just kind of so outlandish that it almost was sort of self deflating. And the fact that, like, American capitalism in whatever tiny form through companies like TSR and some others, like, had a stake in this. Right? Like, it's not true for the Satanic panic in general.

[Michael Hobbes]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

Like this very rarely, like only record labels is sort of the only thing I can think of where, like, 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 Marshall]

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 Dobb]

I mean, one counterfactual I sometimes think about is like, what if D&D had not become big business, but had been a thing that people. There are game forms out there in the 70s and 80s that are entirely done through mimeograph paper, right? Like where 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 like, basically, if it's just a bunch of things kids get up to, like, there's almost no limits to what American law enforcement and American media will call for or try and make happen. But as you say, like, once a profit making corporations there and can be like, I mean, just as simple as. Hey, that's kind of sounding defamatory. Our lawyers might want to explore this, right? Like, it just puts a very serious limit on the kind of bullshit you can shoot your mouth off over. And like, this is, I think, part of the story there that like, I like to think of it as like this David versus Goliath story, but like, it probably is to some extent a Goliath versus Goliath story. And if the second Goliath hadn't been in the room, we might be telling a slightly darker story, I think.

[Sarah Marshall]

I agree. And we love to talk about the David and Goliath story as if it's really inspiring. But it's like kind of. 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. Yeah, yeah. 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 Dobb]

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, like, there's a funny way in which we could argue that like, the panic really started with corporatization and IP and ended through it as well. Right. Like, because a question that I don't think I talked about but that I've thought about before is like, part of why people like Pat Pulling and Thomas Radecki are so freaked out about D and 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 and 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, like Christian style medieval demons. Right. And I think one reason may have been intellectual property.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

Shit, 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? Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

Exactly right. That's why D and D has halflings, not hobbits. Right. 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, you know, he's no one's ip. Right. And so, like, that's how it started, probably. And then. But also it's, as you say, it's the being corporation. And the end saved them too.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

It is the answer and the. And the. The cause of. And the answer to all problems. Like beer.

[Sarah Marshall]

There you go. I don't know. I do really love just the idea of, like, you know, late night and Lake Geneva. It's lake night in anyway, and, you know, 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, you know, if not Satan, then like, demons, whoever. And it is.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

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, it's like humans create culture and there are characters in culture that persist, you know, in one form or another for centuries or millennia. And the fact that we develop folklore isn't we're telling stories about ourselves, you know, not necessarily about the characters in those stories.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. It's also this very funny, like, kind of contagion logic where, like, basically hearing about something at all. And I think this is where homosexuality and satanic panic sort of all merge. Right. Like, because that's the sort of the obvious case I should have made earlier of his point I should have made earlier is the reason why I mentioned stat blocks for these demons is like, you fight them. Right. Like, the point is they're the enemy. Right. Like, yes, there are sort of evil demonic rituals and D&D 99.999,9,9% of the time you're supposed to stop it. That's the story. Right? And this idea that like, oh, the kids will get the content independent of how it is being offered to them.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Adrian Dobb]

I think is one that we, I, at least in the 80s, sort of associate with, with drugs. Right. There's no such thing as trying it. And I associate with sexuality. Right. Like this is how Christian conservatives tend to think about sexuality. And I think that's the other important point to make here. That like basically the way that Dungeons and Dragons plays with these tropes is as 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 like in the vast majority of cases, right, like you're not playing as Sauron, you're playing as Frodo.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean there's a lot of Satan in the Bible. Like let your kids read the Bible. They might like love Satan. I mean, I've always, I read a lot of the Bible as a kid and that is where I got my sense of Satan is like kind of making a good point from time to time, you know, so you can't stop learning.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah. I mean, we'd have to ban Milton for sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I'm sure someone's tried that. But yeah. It also occurs to me that there's something very telling here in this idea of like, because there are things that you shouldn't try, right. Like I don't think that I need to try meth. I don't need to try anything that is highly addictive, you know, and at this point, like even party drugs are often laced with, you know, something that'll kill you and that's not fun. So like 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 like, 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 it's like, well, yeah, that's very. It sucks to, you know, 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. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have kids. I know parenting is really hard, but I guess, you know, don't make it harder than it has to be. Let your kid be A nerd.

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is my general advice for parents. If your kid is figuring out who they are, then, like, that's exciting, you know?

[Adrian Dobb]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Adrian Dobb]

And on a more pragmatic level, if they can figure out how to make a D and D character, they can master TurboTax. So you. You good?

[Sarah Marshall]

I love it. D and D was there all along. D and 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 Dobb]

It's true. And it is one of those funny things that, like, you know, the. I feel like the 80s really have turned out to be eternal in ways that like. 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 Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

Ah, so currently I am running a game and we're actually not playing DND at all. We decided after two and a half years to kind of 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 Marshall]

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

[Adrian Dobb]

Thank you. Thank you for letting me talk. You. You're off about Dungeons and Dragons.

[Sarah Marshall]

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 Dobb]

Yes. So I have a substack. Adriendob.substack.com you can follow my podcasts the Feminist Present and embed with the right. And I would encourage everyone, if they enjoyed my animated versions about Moral Panic, to check out the Cancel Culture Panic, which comes out in September.

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm very excited for that.

[Adrian Dobb]

Me too. I wrote the book initially in German. This is a. 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, huge, huge step forward for me. I'm like, oh, this is nice. At least it's in English too.

[Sarah Marshall]

I wish I knew enough about the German language to make a grand grammar joke, but I would just make a fool of myself. But I'm very so happy for anyone who gets to write a book and be yelled at about it, but especially in two languages.

[Adrian Dobb]

It's just.

[Sarah Marshall]

What a triumph.

[Adrian Dobb]

I know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ah. Wow. We did it. We're imagining we're using the most dangerous tool of all, the imagination.

[Michael Hobbes]

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 Dob for being our wonderful guest. Thank you to Taj Easton for editing this episode. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing this episode. Episode, as always. And we will see you in two weeks.