Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-4.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:29:15 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action Subject: Re: [Bell of Lost Souls] It's Canon: Baldur's Gate 3 Brings D&D To The Vatican Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 13:29:15 -0500 Message-ID: References: <96cfjjtj2pbhif7vqrdsclrtepcggk3ebe@4ax.com> <1fspjjhnt0ce4n216lfmg1o5i345kdd3pr@4ax.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Lines: 105 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-6Kp62WNc2IFvZXuk3EDx1vfkQjRPfzd7j41Ilus1dJhduqKrNxojHJP5zseyvayjSWxL5GBFSbDF5dR!R3TyHAAUbvRaBEjo+4iWsuwaaaJAYtIpKuFBymZWELPMNLH62z11N5jQso+vLw3maYZk8oms X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 6089 On Tue, 19 Nov 2024 15:23:25 -0500, Xocyll wrote: >Dimensional Traveler 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. >>>>> >>>>> I've never had so much trouble posting a reply. >>>>> >>>>> On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:32:27 +0100, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, >>>>> Kyonshi wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> On 11/15/2024 1:11 AM, Justisaur wrote: >>>>>>> On 11/14/2024 10:55 AM, Ross Ridge wrote: >>>>>>>> Kyonshi  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. >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> 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. >>>>>>> >>>>>>> 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. >>>>>>> >>>>>> >>>>>> 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. >>>>>> >>>>>> One would have to look up when DnD was released in Italian maybe. >>>>> >>>>> 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. >>>>> >>>> I'm pretty sure it was an American phoneme. >>>> >>> 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. >> >>Something about some group of teenagers wandering around in the New York >>subway tunnels comes to mind. > >That's Rona Jaffe's Mazes & Monsters. >https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/ > >The Satanism thing was Jack Chick; >https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/jack-chick-christian-comic-cartoonist-death > >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." > >A collection of his lunacy; >https://www.chick.com/products/category?type=tracts > >Specifically for D&D >https://www.chick.com/products/tract?stk=46&ue=d > >Xocyll 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.