Re: [Bell of Lost Souls] It's Canon: Baldur's Gate 3 Brings D&D To The Vatican

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

On Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:23:25 -0500, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:
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Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

On 11/18/2024 5:31 PM, Jhulian Waldby wrote:

Dimensional Traveler wrote:

On 11/15/2024 12:37 PM, Zaghadka wrote:

Top post. First off, please knock it off with the non ANSI characters.
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I've never had so much trouble posting a reply.
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On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:32:27 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Kyonshi wrote:
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On 11/15/2024 1:11 AM, Justisaur wrote:

On 11/14/2024 10:55 AM, Ross Ridge wrote:

Kyonshi  <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

At any rate, it is ironic see D&D go from Satanic Panic to being
installed somewhere in the Vatican in just a few short decades.
Never
let anyone tell you who you are.

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I'm sure D&D was played in some form in the precincts of the Vatican
long before Baldur's Gate 3 was released.  Maybe even during the time
when the Satanic Panic thing was raging in the US and to a lesser
extent
the rest of the English speaking world, but not so much in Italy.

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I don't know that it was Catholics going after D&D.  BADD was
popularized by evangelicals - specifically the TV kind.  Jack Chick
was
was some very weird offshoot of Baptist.
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And I think D&D was too niche back then to even touch some area like
that (which is after all just the size of a small town, even in the
middle of a metropolis), especially as a lot of inhabitants of the
Vatican city are elder professionals.
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One would have to look up when DnD was released in Italian maybe.

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All I know, and excuse me if I'm repeating this story for the 19th time,
is that my Irish Catholic grandmother bought me a first print 1e
*Deities
& Demigods* for freaking Easter. I asked for it, and she was all "Yup."
So no, I don't think her priest was railing against Satan in D&D.
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I'm pretty sure it was an American phoneme.
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I guess the concern is that players may become unable to differentiate
the truth from the water elemental.  I've noticed this in some Dungeon
Masters who argue rules as if it were a physics laboratory.  Not one
hint of "this is fiction" or "we can't find a rule for that."
 
Funny though, I haven't heard anyone mention Satanism in D&D for yrs.
That all stopped a week before I picked up Basic Dungeons & Dragons.
 
Who were those people?  I couldn't tell you, I've forgotten.

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Something about some group of teenagers wandering around in the New York
subway tunnels comes to mind.

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That's Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
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The Satanism thing was Jack Chick;
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/jack-chick-christian-comic-cartoonist-death
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A snippet:  "A lot of people hated Jack Chick. He wrote furious screeds
against Dungeons & Dragons, against Catholicism and against rock music;
he waged a long and ultimately unsuccessful war on Halloween. If you
were Jewish or Muslim or gay, Chick wanted you to be saved from the
fires of hell and wrote a comic to tell you so."
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A collection of his lunacy;
https://www.chick.com/products/category?type=tracts
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Specifically for D&D
https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=46&ue=d
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Xocyll

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I mean, it wasn't _only_ Jack Chick. The American 'Satanic Panic'
thing was fairly wide-spread even before D&D; believers pointed to
comic books, movies, rock'n'roll and all sorts of entertainment as
malefic influences on the youth. D&D was a sort of easy target because
one of its rulebooks featured a demonic idol on its cover. But of any
one person could be pointed to as the driving force for the 'D&D is a
tool of Satan", it's probably Patricia Pulling, nominal private
investigator, author of "The Devil's Web" and founder of BADD
('Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons', an anti-satanism campaign that
specifically targeted tabletop RPGs).
>
Chick was an end-times baptist nutjob who wrote a lot of corny and
logically-inconsistent morality plays in the form of comic strips
which reflected his very weird beliefs, of which 'Dark Dungeons' was
only one of many. As far as I can tell, it came out in the mid 80s,
some years after Pulling founded BADD and after the height of the
Satanic Panic frenzy.

Looks like the timeline is
1981: Publication of Mazes and Monsters book
1982:  Mazes and Monsters CBS TV movie   and suicide of Patricia
Pulling's son who was active in RPGs.
1983: formation of B.A.D.D because RPGs killed her son

Yeah she seems to be the 1980s version of Jack Thompson (who blamed GTA
for everything,) except she was a "consultant" not a lawyer, so she
didn't get disbarred.

1985: OZZY gets sued for Suicide Solution that another bunch of nutjobs
claimed caused their kid to kill himself in 1984.

Seems like a lot of "My kid killed himself and I need to blame someone
that isn't me" behavior.

Xocyll