Tuesday, November 11, 2025
The 3 Waves of the RPG Moral Panic
I've mentioned many times on this blog that, to a great extent, I owe my introduction into the hobby of roleplaying to the furor surrounding the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. Consequently, I've always had a deep interest in the history of the moral panics surrounding D&D and RPGs more generally. That's why I was intrigued when I saw that Seth Skorkowsky had released a lengthy video essay about this very topic. It's a well-presented and informative video and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject. Thanks to Loren Rosson for recommending it to me.
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He has most of this right, with one glaring oversight (that most of us still make to this day.) The McMartin Preschool case was not, contrary to popular and media belief, a hoax. It was instead a crime that employed the double cover of the satanic panic and a false hoax (complete with patsies), according to the FBI records. In other words, children did get hurt. Their reports of tunnels and satanic symbols were honest (if not perfectly clear-minded) reflections of what they witnessed. Yes 5 of the workers tried were very likely the victims of horrific injustice, but 2 of them, plus the media and political bodies, used the "witch hunt narrative" to cover up serious criminal allegations involving the abuse and trafficking of children.
ReplyDeleteMcMartin had more in common with the Penn State, Franklin Bank, or Roman Catholic Church scandal than it did with a wave of hysteria inspired by pop-satanism, and the actual perpetrators likely used the nonsense inspired by BADD and Dark Dungeons and related "moral entrepreneurs" (great epithet, by the way!) as distraction and cover for their actual unspeakable crimes.
Honestly, that's the worst association of all for D&D and T&T and the rest of the gang: the fact that the very libel against TSR et. al, was stripped bare, but only for nefarious purposes.
The upshot was: "See, you are being hysterical about D&D, you are falsely accusing innocent people and therefore, stop scrutinizing criminal networks involved in human trafficking."
By dismissing the satanic panic as mere hysteria ginned up by moralists with books to sell, we incapacitate ourselves from scrutinizing the complexities of strategic feints, false flags, and real crimes.
So what? Well, for the Game, this had serious long-term ramifications. TSR implemented a moral directive for 2ed, a sort of unpublicized "Comics Code" style guardrails that remains embedded to this day. This exacerbated railroading. Because instead of being encouraged to imagine things on your own, you were now overtly discouraged from imagining Evil at play. Choices were cut (potentially) by 1/3rd (LE, CE, NE).
Because it is fundamentally not true that the hysteria that consumed (and fueled) the Game fads of the 80s is the ONLY component of the Satanic Panic, we don't even have a vocabulary today to recognize how real evil did exploit the hysteria. Instead, the Game was changed, the hysteria against the Game died away, along with the international zeal for the Game. And in the dark, in real tunnels overlooked by courts and media alike, real people who had nothing to do with D&D or TSR, got hurt, and nobody knows about it, even though the facts are not in dispute.
The McMartin pre-school trials should not be casually lumped in with the Egbert nonsense or the cartoonishly blasphemous (against, somehow miraculously, _both_ D&D and faith in Jesus Christ!) Dark Dungeons heresy. After all, just because there are charlatan cult-hunters does not mean there are no harmful cults.
If I had one wish for "our people" it would be that we were better equipped to address the complex nuances on the fringes of the Satanic Panic. I think we'd make better games and worry less about appeasing those dark agents who might seek to exploit our reputation for their own gain, while keeping us "in line."
As for the playing group at the time, we learned our response from Gygax himself. Honestly, his most public defenses were actually pretty good, but without a robust follow-up. TSR had a golden opportunity to simultaneously profit off the Satanic Panic while distancing themselves from it. A very simple 16 or 32 page supplement, divided in half to open with an "Apologetics for the Player" section and then a nice little semi-tame, straightforward solo module or setting that the player could run his parents through in an hour or two would have sold massively. We were desperate for guidance and reasonable retorts and clarifications.
ReplyDeleteTo my knowledge, such a thing never crossed TSR's mind at the time, even though my playing group wondered if we might get one in maybe 1985. After all, we were playing a game obsessed with AC, yet the company was leaving its biggest proselytes naked in the face of the onslaught. "Use what you do," is the start-up mantra, but Gary and the rest were too busy to think clearly I guess.