Dungeons & Dragons is a base part of Stranger Things since its first season. However, in the fourth, this role-playing game takes more prominence and is positioned as the cause of many of the bad things that are happening in Hawkins, but did it really have such a bad reputation in the 80s?
The first part of Stranger Things 4 already on Netflix and, for those who are up to date, we come to talk about Dungeons & Dragons and the (bad) fame that 80s RPG had. Yes, the series is pure fiction, but there are many period details and social problems that are quite real, and one of them is the fear and panic that brought d&d to certain adults.
As we see in the first episode of Stranger Things 4, Mike, Dustin Y Luke are part of Hellfire Cluba group of Hawkins students who get together to play Dungeons & Dragons. What Luke he can’t go to the end of the campaign because he has a basketball game, Mike Y Dustin try to talk to Eddiethe club leader, to move”The Cult of Vecna”.
Before bringing this idea to you, we heard that Eddie is reading aloud from a Newsweek article about what this RPG is like: “The devil came to America. Dungeons and Dragons, At first considered a harmless game, now it worries both parents and psychologists. Studies link violent behavior to gambling and argue that it promotes Satanism, ritual sacrifice, sodomy, suicide, and even murder.” Was it really that bad? Yes. In the 1980s there was a lot of news like this, as well as parents and all kinds of adults who wanted to exorcise groups like Hellfire Club.
d&d became much more famous after the disappearance in 1979 of James Dallas Egbert IIIa 16-year-old Michigan State University student who was believed to have been lost in the ventilation tunnels under the campus while playing Dungeons & Dragons. However, years later it became known that in reality his disappearance had nothing to do with the game, but with clinical depression, academic pressure from his parents, difficulties in having friends at university, among others. other things. But these reasons did not receive as much attention as the idea that d&d it had driven him crazy.
Since then, d&d It began to appear as a topic of conversation in various regions of the United States and the story of the ventilation tunnel quickly became an urban legend. It was the basis of Mazes and Monstersa 1981 novel by rona jaffe which was adapted into a film starring a young Tom Hanks: The Threshold of the Game. The idea that this game could get into the minds of young people became the favorite of many, especially fundamentalist Christians, since they did not like the covers of the books of d&d with demon faces.
However, just the month in which he disappeared EgbertMagazine Dragon of d&d had on its cover Satan, which increased the rumors and theories against the game. But as the people who were against d&d “finding out” more on the subject, they found that there was more than one demonic character in the game. The monster manual 1977, the main bestiary sourcebook for the game’s monsters (including the famous Demogorgon), was based on demons that were represented in medieval Christian sources.
For those who don’t know, Dungeons & Dragons It was born from games that simulated the war of medieval times. But, thanks to the imagination of some and the desire to create their own battles, fantasy creatures, more roles, rules were added. However, many of these were influenced by historical realities of the Middle Ages and religion. For this reason he was constantly associated with cults and Satanism.
But the reality is that the co-creators of D&D Gary Gygax Y dave arnsonThey took Christianity very seriously. This is why, when many people began to question the use of “real world” religion in the game, gygax decided to include angels and wrote in the magazine Dragon #43: “While few objections can be made to the use and killing of demons and devils, who would dare to say the same of angels? Surely you can recognize that the use of games of this type is absolutely out of the question for those of the Judeo-Christian faith.
Nevertheless, gygax I thought it was okay to include “real” demons in d&d as long as they were villains, an idea that many players did not share, since there were some who had an interest in the occult and thought it was cool. This group of people took things to the next level and started devising replacement systems to make the magic more “realistic” (by researching supposedly genuine grimoires), though they didn’t end up in the canon. d&d.
This great interest in the occult attracted the ire of the fundamentalists and, although there were several games that dealt with this subject (such as witchcraft Y Black Magic), Dungeons & Dragons became the most popular and got the worst of it. In 1980, in Heber City, Utah, a club of d&d from a high school (similar to hell fire of Stranger Things 4) had to deal with a group of activist parents for irreligious references in the game.
Something that did not help at all was the release (in the same year) of a book of d&d called Deities & Demigodswhich said that “serving a deity is an important part of d&dand all player characters should have a patron god“. Given this, the fundamentalists did not calm down at all, on the contrary, they began to believe that while the children were playing they were also serving sinister forces. Therefore, they looked for heresy in the books of Dungeons & Dragons and even a Kansas evangelical minister began raising money in 1981 to buy copies of d&d and burn them.
These events went straight to the newspapers, both regional and national, and began to harm the clubs of d&d of schools in the country. But that was it, but they also made it to television, mostly to televangelists. One of the most publicized stories was the case of Irving Lee “Bink” Pulling IIwhose suicide in 1982 turned his mother Patricia into an anti-occult activist and the founder of the group BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons). She not only sued the principal of her son’s school for negligence (by allowing the game to be played there, attributing her death to a curse placed on her by another player of d&d), but also sued the creators of the game.
A 1985 Newsweek article titled “Kids: The Deadliest Game?”, included (among other things) two interviews: one with Patricia Pulling and another to the psychiatrist Thomas Radecki. The latter was called to programs where he would recount how parents saw their son “summon a demon from Dungeons & Dragons to his room before he killed himself“. Gary Gygax dismissed these accusations and said that it was “a witch hunt”
fans of Dungeons & Dragonss were very clear that none of that was true, plus there was not enough evidence to show that the rates of murder and suicide among the players of d&d were above the national norm. However, although the game’s publisher publicly insisted that it was all fantasy, d&d had to change several things to calm people down. Replaced character images on different covers, Deities & Demigods Happened to be called Legends & Lore In 1984, the words “devil” and “demon” were removed from all books of d&d and replaced with the fictitious terms “tanar’ri” Y “batezu“.
A decade later, d&d It was losing this bad reputation and the people who were against the game turned their attention to other things. In the 2000s, Wizards of the Coast llaunched his own edition of Dungeons & Dragons and no one made a fuss about the return of the demons. The same thing happened with a new edition of Deities and Demigods.
Now, Dungeons & Dragons continues to gain popularity with his books, games, appearances and references in series and movies. While the Demogorgon, the mind flayer and Vecna are common currency in both the world of stranger things as in ours (in different ways, of course).