“Roll, roll, roll in ze hay.” - Inga, Young Frankenstein

By Brian Thompson

The Setup

My amateur science practice takes up a lot of my free time. Sure, it doesn’t pay anything, and it’s really nothing more than looking at certain aspects of human behavior and snarkily quipping at it, but it takes a lot out of a guy. When I’m not debunking, dismissing, deconstructing, or spending time with my family (in that order), I’m usually sleeping. Or, if my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV worked (thanks a lot, Rockstar Games), shooting hookers with rocket launchers. Which is why I was as surprised as anyone to find myself in a rare moment of leisure contemplating sitting in front of the keyboard and typing a short story about my Dungeons & Dragons character.

I’m a relative newbie to D&D (that’s how us cool kids abbreviate it, as long names tend to aggravate our asthma). My mother went through a particularly ridiculous religious phase while I was first consuming J.R.R. Tolkien’s fever dreams, so I was never allowed to gather around a battle map and pretend to fight gelatinous cubes. That road led only to suicide, insanity, and Satan. Oddly, so did Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, though on that point I agree with my mother’s former self. She’s loosened up a bit since then. She started drinking, riding motorcycles, hanging out with minorities. Sowing her oats, you might say. So now, in my late twenties, I’m finally confident in rolling a few 20-sided dice and allocating skill points to Escape Artist without fear of a motherly smack, or worse, an exorcism.

So where did all the anti-D&D hysteria come from? Why did bad pizza, social awkwardness, and an unhealthy fascination with half-elves suddenly fall in with devil worship? And does anyone actually worship the devil aside from Pat Robertson?

The Findings

You know, I’m constantly amazed by how often large, seemingly complex issues of nonsense lodged in the popular culture can be traced back to one idiot. The Roswell Incident, the Loch Ness monster, the Bermuda Triangle, the Bush administration—all of these things spawned from one person’s lies, delusions, or both. The same is true of the anti-D&D movement of the early ’80s.

The movement began with a real tragedy. Irving Pulling, a teenager from Richmond, Virginia, committed suicide in 1982. His mother, Patricia Pulling, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Irving’s high school principal, since she believed he killed himself after having a D&D curse placed on him while at school.

It helps to remember here that schools were a primary meeting place for D&D players. It almost seems like Gary Gygax, the creator of the game, designed it solely to appeal to the hardcore nerds. Especially back then, social outcasts were the only kind of obsessive personalities who could tolerate the complex, number-based rule system and depth of imagination required to play the game. And where else could mended-glasses shut-ins discover one another than in the classroom? If a school in the late ’70s or early ’80s had a basement, chances are that’s where many quests began.

The fact that Pulling jumped to such an insane conclusion about her son’s death should be a clear indicator of her mental state. And it was. Her initial lawsuit was thrown out, along with another lawsuit against the game’s publisher. She started a one-woman advocacy organization called BADD (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). Among her many accusations against D&D, she cited its uses of demonology (only sort of), witchcraft (sorcery, maybe), voodoo (not in any campaign I’ve played), blasphemy (only when my DM is being a goddamn dick), and homosexuality (I’ll admit to that one—this is escapism after all).

Pulling’s rantings were able to gain traction along with the already present mass hysteria about Satanic cults and the rise of the Christian right as a political movement firmly grasping to Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Although no evidence of such cults were ever found, religious nuts of the day were convinced that everyone’s children were being lured into Satan worship through heavy metal music and…well, mostly just heavy metal music.

Pulling also latched onto the growing lie that D&D caused players to disconnect from reality. In 1979, 16-year-old James Egbert attempted suicide in the tunnels under Michigan State University, then disappeared for a month. A private investigator hired by Egbert’s parents, again with no evidence, concluded that the disturbed kid had been playing a live action D&D game, and his personality was overtaken by his character. The 1981 novel Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe was a thinly-disguised recounting of this false story as fact. Once Patricia Pulling arrived on the scene, the novel became popular enough to be made into a TV movie starring Tom Hanks, which is well worth tracking down on DVD if you want to see one of the best/worst films ever made.

The Conclusion

Of course, all of this is old news these days. Though D&D is still frowned upon by the overly religious, it’s not a public issue like it used to be. This may have something to do with the fact that D&D just isn’t as popular anymore what with the rise of video games and the term “nerd chic”. It might also have to do with the fact that the vast majority of kids who grew up tying beach towel cloaks around their necks and whittling sticks into wizards’ staffs ended up not only as fully functional adults but as the CEOs of Google.

Patricia Pulling never renounced her crazy ideas. In 1989, for example, she published a book called The Devil’s Web: Who is Stalking Your Children for Satan?, which, aside from the heinous subtitle, could very well be the name of one of J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man stories. However, William Dear, the private investigator who made up the LARPing-gone-wrong story about James Egbert that inspired Tom Hanks’ most embarrassing career move (and yes, I’m including Turner & Hooch) has since reversed his opinion, saying in his 1984 book The Dungeon Master that there was no link between D&D and Egbert’s suicide attempt.

This is all good news to me, as I’d hate for my newfound D&D obsession to become something sinister. Although I do kind of wish I could get a hold of a green and red unitard. See my character’s a human thief called Sticky “Sticky Fingers” Fingers, and he’s kind of a flamboyant dresser because… Damn it. I’m going to have to write that short story after all.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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