Dungeons & Dragons Will Steal Your Soul

I was poking around on Metafilter and came across this link to a Jack Chick booklet about Dungeons & Dragons from back in the day. It brought back a flood of memories from growing up weird in rural Utah. I got introduced to D&D by a friend when I was about twelve, and I pretty much lost myself to it until I was about seventeen. I still played regularly into my early twenties, left all that aside, and then ended up playing role-playing games again in Seattle with a group of graduate students, artists, and other misfits. The ageing hipster in me wants to pretend it all never happened, but the complete dork-o-tron in me still misses it.

In particular, it reminded me of a story from when I was about thirteen. A traveling Mormon speaker came to Grantsville to speak about the evils of popular culture. And I mean, evils. His claim to fame was that he had supposedly written the theme song for The Flintstones, but was bilked of his millions by unsavory Hollywood types. This experience led him to question the entertainment industry, and his investigations had revealed to him that popular culture was inspired by the Devil. In addition to the typical backmasking conspiracies, hidden messages in names like KISS, WASP, Styx, etc., he also had a long rant about how Dungeons & Dragons would lead kids to dabble in the occult and eventually suicide pacts with the dark side, which was a common fear in the 80s. Imagine that you've spent your entire life having adults tell you that evil is real, that it is palpable, and that it is after you. Then they pull the rug out by telling you that your favorite hobby is just one big Slippery Slide to Hell.

It pretty much freaked my shit right out.

In a one-on-one question and answer session afterward, I asked him if this was true of all role-playing games or just Dungeons & Dragons. He put his hand on my shoulder and said,

"I think you already know in your heart what is true."

As an adult, I know this to be the kind of bullshit answer you give kids when you have no idea what they're talking about, but at the time, it was a heavy burden on my conscience. So I bought two of his lecture cassette tapes and listened to them at home. They didn't say much more about role-playing games than what he's said in his sermon. But there was one that dealt in depth with the terrors of popular music. On the tape, he included a snippet of the Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK" and deciphered the lyrics.

Even at thirteen, I couldn't really see the connection between anarchy in the UK and the Devil in Grantsville. But the music sounded...

REALLY. FUCKING. COOL.

I went out and bought a copy the next time I got to a decent record store. I listened to it over and over. In the coming years, I got more and more into punk music, bought albums by the Dead Kennedys, FEAR, Black Flag, and everything else I could get my hands on. I never once worshiped the Devil, though I did throw the horns at an Iron Maiden concert once. Mostly, I learned to question petty authority and mock cardboard prophets.

So in a way, Dungeons & Dragons led me to become a smartass and an iconoclast, which is, I'm sure, not what the preacher had in mind. I can't remember the guys name, but I wish I still had the tapes. They'd make great samples.