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Post Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 8:37 pm 
 

Having recently aquired Heroic Worlds (wonderful) I realise that I do not have many books about gaming or gamers.
Any suggestions for a reading list? Anything really considered but I'm particularly interested in the'dark side' - all the bad press, steam tunnels and devil worship - you know the kind of thing!!!

(As an aside to the bad press bit - did any UK gamers ever get any heat from the moral majority back in the day? I ask this as I, nor anyone I know ever had any serious problems with parents attitudes etc and even now all the furore that we heard about seems really strange)

Cheers in advance

carl

  

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Post Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 9:11 pm 
 

From reading old UK rpg zines they got the same bad press at about the same time as the rest of the world...

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Post Posted: Wed Sep 06, 2006 10:37 pm 
 

Oh Yea! Heres some little treats just in time for Halloween ( the Devils Holiday according to the hardcore uber christian religious right ) and they can be picked up dirt cheap on ebay too! Very fun and intersting reads either sober or blitz.

1. Like Lambs To The Slaughter by Johanna Michaelsen ( this whack job goes  nuts about satanic activites our children engage in including: Dungeons & Dragons, Yoga, Star Wars and Saturday Morning cartoons: He Man, Smurfs, and believe it or not Gasp! ..... My lil Pony)

2 Turmoil in The Toyboy ( Again mentions The Evil Satanic game Dungeons & Dragons ) LOL

3. ANY literature put out by jehovas witness that includes satanic activity and Heavy Metal music.

just a few that pop off the top of my head.....

and oh yea if you engage in any post nuclear war rpg games such as gamma world/twilight 2000/ dark futures.. theres a little known series of out of print books written by richard harding in the 80's called outrider that goes way beyond mad max / road warrior, its total blood and guts fun reading.

  

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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 12:06 am 
 

I have the whole Outrider series! Wow, the last thing I expected was to hear of anyone else who had read them.
Personally, for horror/suspense, I think the Shadows series of books was awesome. One of the best short stories I ever read was "The Last Testament of Nick and the Trooper" from #6.


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 12:20 am 
 

Afrika Corps wrote:
1. Like Lambs To The Slaughter by Johanna Michaelsen ( this whack job goes  nuts about satanic activites our children engage in including: Dungeons & Dragons, Yoga, Star Wars and Saturday Morning cartoons: He Man, Smurfs, and believe it or not Gasp! ..... My lil Pony)



I'll second this one.  Most unintentionally funny piece of non fiction ever penned about Satanic influences in all media.  Also check out any Bob Larson stuff written in the 70's and 80's.  He mostly blames rock music but was known to branch out into videao games and eventually RPGs as causing Satan to take hold.

Mike B.


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 12:54 am 
 

He mostly blames rock music but was known to branch out into videao games and eventually RPGs as causing Satan to take hold.


but was he right - have we all been taken over by Satan's influence? (I sometimes think I have when I have to drive through London - though possibly nthing to do with D&D!)

2 Turmoil in The Toyboy ( Again mentions The Evil Satanic game Dungeons & Dragons ) LOL


Either I'm searching in vain on abebooks or this is meant to be toybox (Unless there are some real sickos out thre?!)

  


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 1:50 am 
 

Yea sorry, its supose to be Turmoil in the Toybox, and apparently there was a sequal Turmoil in the Toybox 2.

OUTRIDER SERIES Hell Yea! Beats the pants off any Jerry Arhen or whatever his name is that did the Deathlands or Survivalist Series. Man I wish Richard Harding would have written more books in the outrider series, from my understanding I think he olny wrote 5 books and there was a six in the works but it was never published. I wonder what ever happend to him? If you are a big fan of the post nuclear war/ society has collapsed/ road warrior fight scavengers on the highway for a tank of gas/ fantasy of the 80's then this is a must for anyone interested. I could read these books over and over. They are very violent and extremly creative in thier description of a post apocalyptic America where there is no law.

  


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 4:49 pm 
 

gyg wrote:Having recently aquired Heroic Worlds (wonderful) I realise that I do not have many books about gaming or gamers.
Any suggestions for a reading list? Anything really considered but I'm particularly interested in the'dark side' - all the bad press, steam tunnels and devil worship - you know the kind of thing!!!

(As an aside to the bad press bit - did any UK gamers ever get any heat from the moral majority back in the day? I ask this as I, nor anyone I know ever had any serious problems with parents attitudes etc and even now all the furore that we heard about seems really strange)

Cheers in advance

carl


LOL I did :) It was freaky... I remember a little old lady poking me with an umbrella telling me that it was violent & EVIL!!!! EVIL I TELL YOU !!!!

As for reading try Mazes & Monsters by Rona Jaffe. It was based loosly on an incident at an american uni... Now the real incident had a `factual` book called the `Dungeonmaster` penned about it and told the tale of a guy who committed suicide think his name was Dallas Egbert or Egburt or something. I had the book upto about 7 or 8 years ago - twas lent out and not returned  :cry:

As for websites... Want a laugh ? Read this : http://www.exposingsatanism.org/d_d_talk.htm & http://www.chick.com/articles/dnd.asp

  


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 6:09 pm 
 

In the late 1970's, a couple of the game writers actually came to my wife and I as prominent "sorcerers" in the community. They wanted to make certain the rituals were authentic. For the most part, they are.  These two guys sat in our living room and took copious notes from us on how to make sure the rituals were truly right "from the book," (this meaning that they actually came from magic grimoires or workbooks). They seemed satisfied with what they got and left us thankfully.  Back in 1986, a fellow appeared on The 700 Club who was a former employee and game writer for TSR. He testified right on the show that he got into a wrangle with the management there because he saw that the rituals were too authentic and could be dangerous. He protested to his boss and was basically told that this was the intent to make the games as real as possible.


Authentic rituals in a D&D book?  :lol:  

Sounds like he's got TSR mixed up with Chaosium, which did publish an Authentic Thaumaturgy book.  :roll:


4.Erosion of family values-the Dungeon Master (DM) demands an all-encompassing and total loyalty, control and allegiance.

7.Loss of Self-control-authority over self is surrendered to the DM. Depending on the personality and ego-strength of the player, this loss can be near absolute.   




:lol:  :lol:  :lol:

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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 6:48 pm 
 

In fourth form our Religious Education teacher started his first lesson with an attack on DnD. He stated it involved actual rituals and satan worship. I happened to have a copy of the Dm's Guide in my bag and pulled it out under his nose. I offered it to him and asked if he would point out the relevant passages. All credit to him he took it and gave it back to me later in the week. Next lesson he moved on to Amos...

Following term our new RE teacher handed out copies of The Communist Manifesto.

I attended three churches back then. On the church front attitudes seemed to vary from congregation to conregation depending on the minister.

There is still one member of the group who will not play D&D for religious reasons but plays his Rolemaster Druid in a company which includes a converted Palladium Aberrant Summoner/Diabolist who regularly sacrifices animals to summons demons ... Apparently the conscientious objector has no problem with that because his presbyterian minister has never mentioned either Rolemaster or Palladium.


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Post Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2006 8:22 pm 
 

Brainless religion. How special.


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Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 2:26 am 
 

i never eally had any hassle at all back in the day - my mum didnt like it and thought it was stupid but that was about all.

A


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Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 4:01 am 
 

gyg wrote:Having recently aquired Heroic Worlds (wonderful) I realise that I do not have many books about gaming or gamers.
Any suggestions for a reading list? Anything really considered but I'm particularly interested in the'dark side' - all the bad press, steam tunnels and devil worship - you know the kind of thing!!!

(As an aside to the bad press bit - did any UK gamers ever get any heat from the moral majority back in the day? I ask this as I, nor anyone I know ever had any serious problems with parents attitudes etc and even now all the furore that we heard about seems really strange)

Cheers in advance

carl

Well, I have collected quite a good number of them. I really suggest:

The Dungeon Master (William Dear retells his investigation about the James Dalla Egbert III scandal)

Through Dungeons Deep (very interesting book about RPGs, albeit a bit rare and so pricey...)

Dicing with Dragons (by Steve Jackson UK and Ian Livingstone, the first book about RPGs I have ever read)

The Truth about Dungeons & Dragons (it was written by a religious fanatic - I refuse to label Christians such people because I am Christian and I have nothing in common with them...)

  


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Post Posted: Fri Sep 08, 2006 9:38 am 
 

Holmes' 'Fantasy Role-Playing Games' (1981) has a chapter called 'Are They All Crazy?' It's about 10 pages and is a nice defense of the game by a doctor (neurologist).



Here's a UK copy with a BIN of GBP 5.00:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Fantasy-role-playin ... dZViewItem

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Post Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 1:51 pm 
 

killjoy32 wrote:i never eally had any hassle at all back in the day - my mum didnt like it and thought it was stupid but that was about all.

Same here: not one single hassle that I can recall, other than some general clique issues in high school.

My parents were okay with D&D, my schools had no opinion at all, the community's religious leaders didn't seem to know what it was, and I don't recall any other form of protest or outrage.

My guess is that geography had a lot to do with it: if your community happened to have a vocal opponent who knew how to milk some newspaper and TV exposure, then you had to deal with it ... if not, you just played.

Or maybe it's just that I'm from Nevada, which probably leads the nation in pure "anything goes" attitude. Or, as the real old-timers like to say: "Nevada is the last goddamn free state in the union." :)

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Post Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 1:19 pm 
 

Strangely, living here in Colorado we didn't have the problem with the local churches and D&D/AD&D;  it was the local NOW gang which had problems with it!!  (That's "National Organization of Women", sometimes referred to as NAG.)  And that was because NOW/NAG thought the game was "misogynistic" towards women.  (Maybe the other reason was NOW/NAG couldn't invoke Title IX on D&D/AD&D;  for some reason, most of the players at the time were male by a large margin.)

Now, we DID have the usual "kid playing D&D for real dies" story, where a kid went and died in some tunnels under Colorado College (ironically); that, plus some bad national publicity for D&D, forced the local library to suspend all D&D games--and that "suspension" has lasted over 20 years . . .

(the ironic part regarding Colorado College is that this is a "conservative"  town, and CC is the "liberal bastion" in town.  One would've thought that CC would have gotten the negative publicity--why did they allow someone to get lost in the tunnels under campus--but it didn't.)

  


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Post Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 2:05 pm 
 

zhowar wrote:Holmes' 'Fantasy Role-Playing Games' (1981) has a chapter called 'Are They All Crazy?' It's about 10 pages and is a nice defense of the game by a doctor (neurologist).

Here's a UK copy with a BIN of GBP 5.00:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fantasy-role-playin ... dZViewItem




Thanks for the heads up.  I picked that up out of interest - it is really cool.  :D


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Post Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:29 am 
 

this loks like it might be a balanced view on the subject..




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Brette:)

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