Telling someone you play Dungeons & Dragons as an adult usually earns you one of a few responses. Sometimes, people ask to join my campaigns outright, or hope to play but don’t know the rules. One of my chief joys as a DM is introducing players to TTRPGs for the very first time, so I’m always delighted when mention of my hobby prompts a smile and a positive response.

But it doesn’t always. Sometimes you get that quiet, pinched smile and nod, that “Oh… cool!” from people who follow the lives of tabloid celebrities. They think you’re spending your evenings with a foam sword in your hands, or playing with shiny trading cards of women clad in chain-mail bikinis. The veil of cordiality often comes from a friendly place—but you can tell they don’t get it.

A bit rarer is the essentially unhidden sneer, the upturned nose. You get this from the guy dressed in the poofy navy vest, the gold chain under his shirt, and the khaki shorts–you know the type. If you give him a few more years to grow up, he’ll realize the words “nerd” and “gay” aren’t actually insults, and his suppressed childhood fascination with synchronized swimming was more interesting and valid than his cousins from rural Oklahoma made it out to be. The renaissance of D&D’s popularity in the past decade has driven this category to the brink of extinction, but it still crops up occasionally. Regardless, it’s not the worst option awaiting the modern player.

That thorny crown belongs to the comment you receive by far the most often. It’s the Mariah Carey song still playing at Target during the third week of January, or like losing The Game. It’s the inner flesh of my cheek I’ve already accidentally bitten down on twice today, right in the moment I realize popping a piece of Juicy Fruit was a critical lapse of foresight:

“Oh, like from Stranger Things.”

Fuck you. Stop it, please. Just stop. I do not want to hear about that gods-forsaken show even once more until I enter the lifetime after my next reincarnation. I am literally begging—and my problem is worse because the people saying this don’t understand. The community’s outsiders cannot fathom the depths of grayscale repetitive misery I have sunk to in having my hobby-turned-profession consistently reduced to a two-word allusion, but their ignorance doesn’t make it better. If anything, it makes it worse, because I can’t even get mad at them. These people are entirely accidental, unsuspecting bystanders to my slow, swirling toilet-bowl descent into madness. And worse, goddamn it, the show is actually good.

My only comfort is that even the stranger things response is an improvement on the way things used to be. Back when our status as the high priests of nerds would’ve earned more than condescension, contempt, or even having to incessantly correct people’s misunderstanding of what the Demogorgon is, when some people literally risked their jobs and positions in their congregation if they refused to hide away their AD&D Rule Books.

Readers on a DM/GM-for-hire’s blog are probably already familiar with that to which I refer. The broad strokes of Our Dark Ages are common knowledge in the D&D community, and the show-that-shall-only-sparingly-be-named plays off of the phenomenon a bit. Still, even you may not know everything.

Wild tales of Satanist cults, suicides, and the practice of witchcraft tend to contain at least a blind or two, after all.

My first taste of D&D’s Satanic Panic came, believe it or not, from another player. This was a decade ago, you understand. I’d just begun playing and running D&D games in high school, and my friend group invited everyone we knew to our new D&D club’s weekly meetings.

C-Lunch had just started. I sat at a round, white table doing my daily reading. The plastic, sweet smell of $1.25 chocolate chip cookies wafted through the room with the growing lunchline hum. 

A few friends at my lunch table pulled out a board game called “Secret Hitler”, so I pulled my book toward my chest to make room. My eyes didn’t move from their place on the page. Instead, the frayed edges of my black leather book lifted up and off the table, betraying its title in an all-caps, glitter-gold bold serif font: HOLY BIBLE. I insisted on ESV, if that means anything to you.

“Rachel’s backing out,” a voice said from behind me. Lily plopped her Vera Bradley lunchbox down and sunk her bell-bottom blue jeans into the seat next to me.

“What do you mean?” I asked, finally looking up. My friend Rachel spent two hours building her new vengeance paladin character only yesterday; She’d commented several times how excited she was to be playing her first D&D game.

Lily poked her face through a tie-dye headband. She tussled back her hair, revealing the white dove on the baggy Woodstock t-shirt she wore.

“Her parents won’t let her play tomorrow. They won’t even let her come.”

“Does she have plans?” I asked. Lily shook her head.

“They learned the club was for D&D and freaked out. Apparently, if she goes, she won’t be able to leave the house for anything but school and mass for a month.” I shut my bible when Lily said that, nestling the holy text into my satchel beside my notebook, my purple Crown Royal dice bag, and my copies of the Monster Manual,The Way of Shadows and The Case for Christ.

“Why would they freak out about her playing a dice game?” I asked, my fingers still poking through the bag. “Is she failing a class or something?”

Lily smiled at me. Her hands held a half-unwrapped sandwich, unmoving.

“Are you serious?” she asked, not unkindly. I met her eyes, and then I nodded.

“Wey,” Lily said, “People think it’s tied up with the Devil. Witchcraft and demonic possession. You didn’t know that?”

“What are they, J.W.s?” I asked, despite knowing better. Lily rolled her eyes before continuing.

“Apparently, some kids in the 80s were playing, and they started meeting out in the woods to host their games. Immersion, or whatever,” Lily told me, “And they accidentally summoned a pit fiend during one of their sessions.” 

I winced at the name. You didn’t need to play D&D very long to learn about pit fiends—some of the most powerful devils in the game. Powerful enough to kill dragons. Powerful enough to make warlock contracts.

“Yeah,” she said, eyes wide and nodding, “They broke some seal, I think, and didn’t realize until too late. He kept himself invisible the whole time, while shadowing them and making things go wrong. One of their characters started to get suspicious, so the pit fiend killed him.”

I cocked my head to the side. Talking about devils and demons had always made me uncomfortable, being the bible thumper I was. Stories were stories, but to me, there was a more fearsome truth behind the fantasy.

“Ok,” I said, “so what? Character deaths happen.” Lily flicked her eyes over each shoulder, as if she was getting nervous. She pursed her lips.

“That night, the kid whose character died didn’t come home for curfew. His parents called around, went out looking for him. It wasn’t until they checked the forest where they hosted their games that they finally found him.”

Lily paused for effect. If I had to guess, my other friends at the table were watching where I sat, all tense in my seat.

“He hung himself out there, with his character sheet still crumpled up in his cold, dead fist.”

I wouldn’t find out for some time that this story never happened. Or, at least, it didn’t happen quite as Lily recounted it to me. But she and I were both raised in the Evangelical Christian communities of the American South—she perhaps less inundated by it than I—and games of demonic telephone amongst those of us born-again have their way of… blowing certain details out of proportion. 

Things certainly blew out of proportion with me. Can you imagine? I’d only just finished reading Matthew 8 for my Lectio Divina, and here I was discovering portions of my religious community believed my favorite hobby to be the hands and feet of the Beast 666. I was starting the D&D club at my own school, inviting innocent, unsuspecting students into the (rumored) clutches of Lucifer himself after preaching to them about Jesus’s love in the hallways.

I think Lily probably knew the impact her story was going to have on me. Maybe she played up the details to prompt a more…superstitious response. Maybe she’d heard the story recounted the same way, and she was just a naturally theatrical DM/GM with a penchant for horror in her storytelling. That’s a touch of ambiguity I’ll leave to my readers to decide.

But my response was not ambiguous. Dare I say it was peculiar to the life I lived at that time. You see—I wasn’t some puffed-up, Pelagian, superstitious papist, sign-of-the-crossing and threatening to ground my children because of a stray rumor. I was a puffed-up, twice-born, five-point-reformed Heir of Martin Luther and John Calvin, and I would taste and see for myself. I had to get to the bottom of it. I had to do my own research and due diligence, for the sake of my friends and to look out for the safety of my own soul and, perhaps, to satiate a bit of morbid curiosity at the same time.

“The Satanic Panic,” Lily had called it—I would eventually understand the name to be synonymous with mad paranoia, with biblical exegesis and theology taken to their fear-warped, irrational extremes. 

But at that moment in the lunchroom, that little child version of me didn’t. I was sitting on a promontory between heaven and hell itself; the grasping, black hands of the latter were reaching up, exhilarating me, threatening to swallow me whole.

…

The way we arranged ourselves on school buses growing up always amused me. Our order was never a perfect science. Still. Look long enough, and you could glimpse some personality in the row a person chose. 

Keeners and the younger, nervous types tended to stay up front near the doors. The deeper you traveled into the bus, the more you had to shuffle past people and trip over their bags. It meant more standing around waiting for the person ahead of you to stow and sit, all the while lingering in full view of the forty pairs of eyes staring at you. Running the gauntlet this way formed its own filter.

Behind the keeners you had the menagerie: students of every stripe just onboard to get home. They sat with friends or by themselves, sometimes talked, sometimes listened to music or whatever else. A petri dish, and often unpredictable.

  The middle-rear was the social hub. Older kids and the more confident would claim it like a birthright. But the rear was also home for people with something to hide. Kids would slump low back there and hold in the wisps from their mango Juul pods or blow spit balls or pass out cough drops to friends like they were marijuana edibles. More distance and cover from the bus driver naturally gave more opportunity for mischief, so more things happened in the back. This was where the “plot” of the bus route tended to unfold. A web of friendships and acquaintances, characteristic youthful drama, and conflict bubbled up from it.

No one was essentially tied into any of these categories, of course. They would shift from year-to-year, swelling in importance during middle school and growing fuzzier as we aged and more of us learned to drive. A given student was likely to join each of these orders at least once. I was no exception. Still, many of us developed a preference, given the chance.

That day Lily told me of the panic and the broken seal, my favorite spot was open; I slid on down and settled into the corner all the way in the back.

…

My ride home was bumpy. We opened a few windows to air the stink of gym bags and the swelter of Texas heat. A beam of sunlight flooding from the emergency exit door shined down on the pages of the 5e Monster Manual in my hands. Monster Manuals are D&D’s encyclopedias on the most common monsters in Dungeons & Dragons. They give only a shallow entry for each creature. The devil’s section, for example, was only 13-pages long. The pit fiend entry was only one.

I stared at the picture of the pit fiend on the page. Official D&D art quality varies wildly, but something about the towering fiend kept me staring. The blank eyes, maybe. The maw. The way his clawed foot bleeds over and onto his stat block, like he’s stepping up and out of the page. You’d have to see it to understand.

But the actual information about them gave little hint about their behavior outside of hell. I flipped back through the book to the Devil Overview on page 66:

“Devils understand the failings that plague intelligent mortals, and they use that knowledge to lead mortals into temptation and darkness, turning creatures into slaves to their own corruption. Devils on the Material Plane use their influence to manipulate humanoid rulers, whispering evil thoughts, fomenting paranoia, and eventually driving them to tyrannical actions.”

My finger ran down the dark, inky paragraphs. 

“...confined to the Lower Planes, but they can travel beyond those planes by way of portals or powerful summoning magic…They love to strike bargains with mortals seeking to gain some benefit or prize…any mortal creature who breaks such a contract instantly forfeits its soul…Only Divine Intervention can release a soul after the devil has claimed it.”

The entry was… mildly helpful at best. I didn’t need vague information on the possibility of making deals or even a fiend’s desire to tempt mortals into darkness—ideas already familiar to me. 

How can you tell when they’re near? How do they communicate? What does being under their influence feel like? I’d been playing D&D for over a year by then with friends from church and hadn’t felt anything. How did demons pick and choose who they influenced and who they left alone? My only connection to the manual was the pit fiend in Lily’s story; Did demons need to be present in-game like that to find you outside of it? The humor and irony of looking for truth in a fantasy game book was lost on me.

Nausea crept into my stomach, like someone had cast Bestow Curse. The pit fiend’s eyes and the player hanging in the woods flickered like a candle in the dim room of my mind. Could demons genuinely influence me through this game? 

Even back then, I knew I needed a more reliable source. These subjects were too important and too dangerous to lean on anything but the truth. 

So I took out my Bible and I read.

TO BE CONTINUED