Welcome Operatives! In today’s show, Rob and Don explore the Ritual Satanic Abuse panic that gripped America during the 1970s and 1980s and how the game Dungeons and Dragons became wrapped up in it. Then, in the second half of the show, the pair dig deep into the cinematic roots that laid the groundwork for Satanism’s grip over the American psyche of the period. All this and 2000 Maniacs are waiting for you in this episode of the Department of Nerdly Affairs.
Closing Music: Ode to Joy performed by Oliver Eckelt
Episode Show Notes:
Satanic Ritual Abuse
Michelle Remembers
The McMartin Preschool Trial
Mazes and Monsters (book)
Mazes and Monsters (video- full movie)
Dark Dungeons
Geraldo on Satanism (video)
Dungeon Master’s Guide
Dungeons and Dragons
Saturday Morning PSAs (video)
Reptilian Obama
Gary Gygax Biography
Bill Nye vs Ken Ham Debate (video)
High Schools Ban D&D
Villains and Vigilantes RPG
Champions RPG
Traveller RPG
Warhammer FRPG
Realms of Chaos Book
Judge Dredd
Ghostbusters RPG
Robotech RPG
Extra Discussion:
Rosemary’s Baby (video clip)
The Devil’s Hand (video- full movie)
Blood Feast (video, trailer, gory, we got the name backwards)
The Bright Young Things
Bonnie and Clyde
New Hollywood
Hayes Code
2000 Maniacs (video, trailer, gory)
American Grindhouse
Okay, 45 minutes in and I have to comment because I’ll explode if I don’t.
– The Satanic Panic. Yes, most of it was crap. But what freaked me out recently was I’ve become good friends with a retired therapist by the name of Rae Gabriel. She spent a lot of time in the eighties and the nineties with her clients being mostly abused women. She is NOT a bible thumper. Far from it. In fact, she admits to very much having a problem with Christianity herself. But she also has some pretty terrifying experiences of women and Satanic cults out of Vancouver and cover ups by the police to not create a panic in the community. Your entire first segment gave me chills. While I think the bible belt totally ran with the stories from the west coast, doesn’t necessarily mean they were based on crap.
– Argh. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons were not evolved one from the other but rather two different games that arose from the original system. They were called those things to differentiate but the Basic/Expert sets were more story based and the AD&D was more rules based. Two different takes on the game. Eventually the AD&D version won out because deep down most DM’s are rule Nazis. But people keep mistaking the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editions_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons
– You’ll also notice if you follow the wikipedia entry that the second edition that the Monster Manuals (One and Two. Only one is marked here) and a third the “Fiend Folio” had all the elements of Demons, Devils, and Daemons from the first edition but changed their name to abishai. And yes there were lots of references to actual names of the Devil that were pulled from minor devils or demons from things like Paradise Lost by Milton and Dantes Inferno as well as other Christian mythos. Asmodeus, Baalzebul, Dispater, and Geryon.
I played the basic never bothered with the expert and went straight to the Advanced D&D and never looked back after 2nd edition (of which I have a pretty nearly complete collection of rules and the like). I never understood why go to other editions if you’re creating awesome campaigns based on a system you like but hey… some people have money to burn I suppose.
I didn’t find it impossible to understand. I left that for games like Rifts, and Starfleet Battles and the like. LOL
– We played D&D in our high school club. I helped run it, and we had the nervous tacit approval of the administration as long as we kept it on the down low. One of our players actually was a sociopathic murderer. That part occurred when he was in university. Ironically, he murdered someone my wife went to high school with. So those were interesting conversations as I went to his trial as a university reporter a couple of times to write articles on the happenings of the trial. His lawyer- the famous Canadian lawyer Clayton Ruby- used the excuse that he played D&D and lost understanding of reality. The fact is he was a sociopath from early on and none of us thought he was all right in the head. He was a couple years younger than I, and I didn’t hang out or play with him because he creeped me out.
– CBC Ideas had a great show on Dungeons and Dragons when Lister Sinclair was the host. I recorded it on my cassette player and replayed it several hundred times during my youth. They had the mother from BADD as well as some other bible thumpers that just sounded ridiculous. But hey, those same people would have dissed comics as well.
Keep up the good work!
J
(But she also has some pretty terrifying experiences of women and Satanic cults out of Vancouver and cover ups by the police to not create a panic in the community. Your entire first segment gave me chills. While I think the bible belt totally ran with the stories from the west coast, doesn’t necessarily mean they were based on crap.)
I view Satanic Cults sacrificing people like I view Conspiracies. Yeah, there are Conspiracies out there, but they’re nowhere near as common as people seem to think. Likewise, there are weird religious cults all over, and some might be Satanists, but even among them I doubt most are doing anything actually nefarious to anyone but their membership.
(I didn’t find it impossible to understand. I left that for games like Rifts, and Starfleet Battles and the like. LOL)
You’re an SFB player? Me too! I had almost all the books, especially the Captain’s Log scenario books with the short stories in them and variant ships. Most of the SSD sheet books as well. I doubt anyone plays anymore, but that was an awesome game back in the day.
Rob
>she also has some pretty terrifying experiences of women and Satanic cults out of Vancouver and cover ups by the police to not create a panic in the community
That was one of the problems the whole Panic exacerbated; it got to be real tough IN A HURRY to differentiate between legitimate cases, and other events. After “Michelle Remembers” hypnotism and recovered memories became a BIG part of the evidence for a “Satanic Conspiracy” plaguing N. America. Further investigation showed that many of the subjects had been inadvertently led by the hypnotists into remembering things that didn’t happen, or reconstructed events based on things they had heard recently in the news. Because of the (then) current climate investigations would be off and running without considering the difficulty and unreliability of the evidence.
I’d seen an interview YEARS ago with an FBI agent who’d been investigating the Satanic Conspiracy, and he’d mentioned that a few years in someone crunched the numbers and discovered that there weren’t enough missing persons cases to account for all the supposed human sacrifices taking place…. at which point the notion of Satanic baby farms came up; places where infants would be raised and exported for sacrifices. No evidence of this was ever found (other than some questionable recovered memories) and millions of dollars and man hours were spent on the cases.
So the thing is; it’s not that stuff like ritual abuse DOESN’T happen, but that it’s so easy for everyone to jump on the bandwagon as a means to explain all sorts of bad things that happen. Humans are wired to like simple answers, and if there’s a way to unify it all…. especially if doing so lets us demonify something we already don’t like…. we’ll take that out.
>used the excuse that he played D&D and lost understanding of reality. The fact is he was a sociopath from early on and none of us thought he was all right in the head.
Yeah. Like that.
>Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Basic/Expert Dungeons and Dragons were not evolved one from the other but rather two different games that arose from the original system.
They were, but in the earliest days that separation wasn’t so clear. The Monster Manual was advertised as an expansion of the original/current D&D (which was the white box/blue book versions) and the Red book basic/advanced set was advertised as a clarification/compilation of the original versions. They became two separate games once they came out. AD&D was considered by the company (and most players) to be THE game, and the Basic D&D set was considered an introduction to the game. (That’s one reason it took so long for the extensions to come out.) I’ve always figured this happened because at the time, the gaming community was VERY small, and it was assumed that everyone would pick up and play everything. The Red book came out around the time of the Panic, which GREATLY increased the number of players, so they figured a simple version of the game was needed to educate new players. (The older versions, AND AD&D were almost impossible to learn on your own….)
I remember this ‘cos I remember being confused by the Monster Manual when it came out due to the number of unfamiliar stats. (Like psionics; which were part of the White Box rules, but got dropped for the next two versions….)
>I never understood why go to other editions if you’re creating awesome campaigns based on a system you like but hey… some people have money to burn I suppose.
We played both a fair bit around here, ‘cos they’re both different experiences. AD&D is a bit more “grounded;” players don’t become supremely powerful. (Although they can come close.) Once they added the other expansions, D&D became distinct ‘cos players could (literally) become gods. They added rules for running a country because characters passing beyond the “Expert” rules became like unto forces of nature. The D&D campaign became more about the world as you played, whereas AD&D was always focussed on the characters.
>Keep up the good work!
Many thanks! And keep up the great comments.
Don C.
You’re absolutely right about the panic. I can’t quite remember one of the stories but it had to do with a woman getting out of the cult and nearly dying as they infected her drinking water with sewage over runs or something.
There were some strange overlappings in D&D but my complaint centres around buying three, four, and upwards when I found 2nd to be really effective in pulling everything together.
I was actually asked to DM the first GenCon. I think they offered that to founding members who bought the Dragon Magazine. My buddy and i couldn’t afford the magazine so we split it. He’d get half the issues and I would too. I curse myself now, but there’s no way my parents would have let a 14 year old boy go down to Wisconsin. It just wasn’t done!
Lastly, I’m shocked you guys totally missed Film Noir. After the war, Noir was a really anti-hollywood establishment filming genre that had all kinds of elements you give kudos to the fifties and the seventies. Morally reprehensible heroes, scandalized vixens, and not so happy endings.
Hurry up and get episode 5 out already you slackers 😉
J
(I was actually asked to DM the first GenCon. I think they offered that to founding members who bought the Dragon Magazine. My buddy and i couldn’t afford the magazine so we split it. He’d get half the issues and I would too. I curse myself now, but there’s no way my parents would have let a 14 year old boy go down to Wisconsin. It just wasn’t done!)
I understand your parent’s concerns (especially with everyone claiming GenCon was really SATANCON at the time), but damn that would have been awesome! The glory days of DRAGON Magazine, I remember those well, although the people around here tended to favor White Dwarf over Dragon by the time I got into it.
(Lastly, I’m shocked you guys totally missed Film Noir. After the war, Noir was a really anti-hollywood establishment filming genre that had all kinds of elements you give kudos to the fifties and the seventies. Morally reprehensible heroes, scandalized vixens, and not so happy endings.)
Well, we can only cover so much at a time. I agree that helped with the anti-establishment side of Hollywood, but they weren’t pushing things as far as Horror was back in the day. Heck, you’ll notice there were no Lovecraft based movies until, what, the 1970’s?
(Hurry up and get episode 5 out already you slackers)
Episode 5 will be out on December 18th, since we release every second Friday. We might go weekly in the future, but for now, bi-weekly suits our schedules better.
Glad you’re enjoying the show! Thanks for the comments!
Rob
>there are weird religious cults all over, and some might be Satanists
‘Course, THAT’S a tricky bit too; since there’s an actual Satanic Church. Most “Satanists” aren’t affiliated with any bigger group; they’re bored teens looking for something to cheese off their parents so they declare themselves Satanists. Or Wiccans. Or Socialists…. or whatever the bugaboo of the day is.
>You’re an SFB player? Me too!
NERDS!!!!
Oh, wait….
I think SFB still has a following. Most of the books are available from the company (I forget who has the rights currently) as .pdfs. I think the minis might still be in production as well. (I’ve been looking to finish MY collection too.)
>my complaint centres around buying three, four, and upwards when I found 2nd to be really effective
That’s a good point; and it’s a thing that became a HUGE problem in the 90’s…. with companies releasing a game, and releasing “2nd Edit” a year or less later. I can understand stopping at a certain point. (For me, I’ll play D&D white, red, AD&D or 3rd edit. The rest I have no gripes with, but I’m satisfied with these versions. For a number of reasons.) But that’s the nice thing about free choice.
Funny thing; people seem to agree, and nowadays you can find companies putting out new material for almost every version of almost every game. (I just got a bunch of supplements for White Box D&D.)
>I’m shocked you guys totally missed Film Noir.
That’d be a show unto itself. Noir came about as a way around the censors…. titillation without titillation and darker stories cloaked beneath atmosphere and staging. But to get into that you’d need to talk about the standards of the day, influences, the pulps…. B-Movie Schlock theater is easier to deal with ‘cos most of us are familiar with it’s children. (Especially if you’ve ever watched an 80’s horror movie….)
>you’ll notice there were no Lovecraft based movies until, what, the 1970’s?
Close:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057128/
Although this one is more familiar:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059465/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Don C.