Dungeons & Dragons controversies

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeons & Dragons arrived as a commercial game in 1974, and within a decade it had been accused of promoting Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, and murder. Courts heard lawsuits blaming the game for a teenager's death. A one-person advocacy group devoted itself entirely to the game's elimination. Religious tracts described its rulebooks as portals to genuine occult danger. What drove one of the fiercest moral panics in the history of popular entertainment? Who sustained it, and what did the evidence show when researchers finally looked?

• 2. The Steam Tunnel Myth

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  James Dallas Egbert III was 16 years old in 1979 when he attempted suicide in the utility tunnels beneath Michigan State University's campus. He then went missing for a month. His parents hired private investigator William Dear to find him. Dear discovered that Egbert played Dungeons & Dragons and had heard rumors about students using the campus steam tunnels for live-action sessions of the game. Dear knew little about the hobby. He speculated to journalists that Egbert had become lost during one such session. Most reporters treated the speculation as established fact.

  Dear's 1984 book, The Dungeon Master, corrected that account. He rejected any link between D&D and Egbert's disappearance. He acknowledged that the teenager's domineering mother and his struggles with his sexuality had far more to do with the crisis than his interest in role-playing. By then, the myth had already inspired several works of fiction.

  In 1981, Rona Jaffe published the novel Mazes and Monsters, with a plot drawn from the Egbert case. The book was adapted into a made-for-television film in 1982, starring Tom Hanks. In 1983, the Canadian film Skullduggery depicted a D&D-like game as a tool of the devil to transform a young man into a serial killer. Neal Stephenson's 1984 satirical novel The Big U included a similar incident involving a live-action fantasy role-player dying in a steam tunnel accident.

  Sales of the D&D Basic Set stood at roughly 5,000 copies per month before the steam tunnel incident. By the end of 1979, that figure exceeded 30,000 copies per month and was still climbing. Among those who took the coverage not as curiosity but as warning was Patricia Pulling, an anti-occult campaigner from Richmond, Virginia, who would go on to found an organization dedicated entirely to eliminating D&D.

• 3. Patricia Pulling and BADD

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  Pulling's son Irving died by suicide in 1982. Because Irving had played Dungeons & Dragons, Pulling filed a wrongful death lawsuit against his high school principal, claiming a D&D curse had been placed on Irving shortly before his death. She later sued TSR, the game's publisher. The case against TSR was dismissed in 1984, and reporters disproved most of her claims. In 1990, author Michael A. Stackpole published The Pulling Report, a detailed review critical of BADD's methods of data collection, analysis, and reporting.

  BADD's reach extended to national television in 1985. In a segment on 60 Minutes that year, host Ed Bradley said the game 'has become popular with children anywhere from grammar school on up.' Thomas Radecki, president of the National Coalition on TV Violence, linked D&D to 28 murders and suicides. D&D co-creator Gary Gygax responded: 'This is make-believe. No one is martyred, there is no violence there. To use an analogy with another game, who is bankrupted by a game of Monopoly? Nobody is. The money isn't real. There is no link, except perhaps in the mind of those people who are looking desperately for any other cause than their own failures as a parent.'

  A 1988 murder case in Washington, North Carolina, brought the game further unfavorable attention. Chris Pritchard, a student at North Carolina State University, allegedly masterminded the murder of his stepfather, Lieth Von Stein, for his $2 million fortune. Investigators focused on Pritchard's role-playing group after a game map depicting the Von Stein house turned up as evidence. Pritchard's friends Neal Henderson and James Upchurch were implicated in the plot. All three went to state prison in 1990. Upchurch's death sentence was commuted to life in 1992. True crime authors Joe McGinniss and Jerry Bledsoe played up the role-playing angle in books that were later adapted into two separate television films.

  BADD ceased to exist after Pulling died of cancer in 1997, the same year Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR.

• 4. TSR Concedes, Then Reverses

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  From $2.3 million in 1979, sales of Dungeons & Dragons grew to $8.7 million by the end of 1980. But the pressure on TSR was real. In 1989, the company removed references to demons, devils, and other controversial supernatural creatures from the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The creatures did not disappear entirely; they were renamed. Devils became baatezu, demons became tanar'ri. Within official publications, both were referred to as fiends, and the original names went unspoken for years, even as many players at their own tables continued to use them.

  Two supplemental books signaled the new owners' change in direction: A Paladin in Hell in 1998 and Guide to Hell in 1999. President Peter Adkison directed Monte Cook to lead the reintroduction. Cook felt that removing the names had been 'lip service' to critics. He believed any player who picked up a Monster Manual and saw a gargoyle would still assume the game had demons. The name on the page made no difference. The Guide to Hell offered an in-universe justification for the dual naming, explaining that devils are 'by nature deceptive' and routinely use multiple names to 'muddy the waters of scholarship.'

  The 3rd Edition, released in 2000, addressed demonology more explicitly than any edition before it. The panic that had constrained earlier editions had largely subsided by then, allowing the new release to experiment without triggering the same response. In 2002 and 2003, Wizards published two books with explicit mature audience labels: the Book of Vile Darkness and the Book of Exalted Deeds. The Book of Vile Darkness included rules for drug addiction, cannibalism, mutilation, sacrifice, and sexual fetishes. Dragonlance co-creator Tracy Hickman called the book 'cheap, trashy and demeaning' and said that 'every dark fear that mothers and clergy across America have about D&D is now, suddenly, true.' In 2016, The New York Times reported that parental anxieties had shifted to video games, and that the moral panic over Dungeons & Dragons had fully subsided.

• 5. The Research Verdict

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  The American Association of Suicidology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Health and Welfare Canada all investigated the link between fantasy gaming and suicide. All three concluded that no causal link exists. The numbers, when examined, told a story the panic could not accommodate.

  Between 1979 and 1988, BADD and affiliated organizations recorded 128 suicide attempts by game players. In the same period, overall youth suicide for Americans and Canadians aged 15 to 25 ran at roughly 5,300 per year. Researchers calculated that at least 1,060 gamer suicides should have occurred in that period, based on the estimated size of the player community. The actual recorded figure was 128. Most of those records were unsourced newspaper clippings that referred to the same incidents multiple times. Suicide among role-playing game players ran significantly below the national average for their age group.

  One study found 'no significant correlation between years of playing the game and emotional stability.' Depression and suicidal tendencies were not typically associated with role players in research conducted outside BADD. A 2015 study found that psychiatrists did not associate role-playing games with poor mental health. A 2005 academic study noted that after 1992, researchers could locate almost no new letters, articles, or editorials on D&D and Satanism, except for retrospective pieces treating the panic as history.

• 6. Race on the Rulebook Page

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  Of the hundreds of adventurer illustrations in the first and second edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, none depicted a nonwhite character. Humans in the early game were coded as culturally white. Critics traced this Eurocentric focus to Tolkien's work, which the game took as its primary source material.

  Oriental Adventures, released in 1985, was a bestseller at the time. Fans and designers have since criticized its representation of Asian culture. Aaron Trammell, in the academic journal Analog Game Studies, described it as using orientalism. He defined orientalism as 'a way of reducing the complexity of eastern culture to a set of problematically racist and sexist stereotypes.' Game designer Daniel Kwan wrote that Asians in the supplement were depicted as 'violent and savage, uncivilized and in need of foreign saviors and as objects of fetishization.' Supplements covering other non-Anglo-Saxon cultures followed: Maztica Campaign Set in 1991, Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures in 1992, and The Jungles of Chult in 1993. Critics applied similar concerns to many of these.

  Ed Greenwood introduced Chult, an Africa-inspired region, in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set of 1987. The Jungles of Chult sourcebook section was written by James Lowder. He listed the Allan Quartermain tales of H. Rider Haggard and the Professor Challenger stories of Arthur Conan Doyle as pulp inspirations. The 2017 adventure module Tomb of Annihilation was criticized for its depiction of Chult. One reviewer described the setting as 'an amalgamation of African cultures, a trope frequent in 20th-century media that flattens the dimensionality of human experiences on the continent, which contains hundreds of ethnic groups.'

  The orcs of Dungeons & Dragons trace their roots to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where they are depicted as deranged and repulsive. The first major appearances of orcs outside Tolkien's work were in the original Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1977. Australian academic Helen Young found that descriptions of orc bodies across almost all editions resonated with anti-Black racist stereotypes, including frequent comparisons to pigs. A line from the 4th Edition book Wizards Presents: Races and Classes illustrates the tone: 'where dwarves gather and build, orcs scavenge and destroy, and where dwarves are dutiful and industrious, orcs are treacherous and lazy.'

  The drow, a dark-skinned subrace of elves, were first mentioned in the 1st Edition Monster Manual of 1977. Their most famous representative, Drizzt Do'Urden, is presented as a hero who overcame his evil culture. Author James Wyatt wrote in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes that Drizzt 'is a compelling hero because of the evil society he grew up in.' Critics noted that framing Drizzt as an exceptional good individual reinforced the assumption that the rest of his people are inherently evil. Scholar James Rocha wrote that the relationship between drow and lighter-skinned dark elves in the Forgotten Realms setting 'mirrors American history in a very uncomfortable fashion.'

  Wizards of the Coast began addressing these issues publicly in 2020. In March, the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount revised orc statistics to remove the intelligence penalty that earlier editions had carried. In June, the company committed to revising portrayals of peoples including the Vistani, an in-fiction group linked to the Romani people. In November, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything introduced optional rules that changed how racial ability score bonuses worked. Lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford said those bonuses had never been about game balance. They existed, he said, 'strictly to reinforce the different archetypes that have been in D&D going all the way back to the 70s.'

  In September 2022, Wizards issued an apology for offensive material in Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. Game design architect Christopher Perkins announced a new inclusion review process. It would require 'every word, illustration, and map' to pass review by multiple outside cultural consultants at several steps in development. In December 2022, Wizards replaced the word 'race' with 'species' in official materials, following consultation with multiple outside cultural consultants.

• 7. Business Wars at TSR

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  Dave Arneson, who developed the role-playing format that became Dungeons & Dragons alongside Gary Gygax, filed the first of two royalty lawsuits in 1979. At issue were the royalties for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a product for which TSR did not acknowledge Arneson's intellectual property claims. A second suit followed in 1985. In Dragon magazine editorials, Gygax began minimizing Arneson's contributions. He described Arneson's Blackmoor game as merely 'an amended Chainmail fantasy campaign.' In 1997, Peter Adkison paid Arneson an undisclosed sum to clear remaining royalty claims. This allowed Wizards of the Coast to retitle the game simply Dungeons & Dragons.

  After D&D co-founder Don Kaye died in July 1975, Gygax and Brian Blume reorganized their partnership into a corporation called TSR Hobbies. Gygax held 150 shares and Blume held 100. Dungeons & Dragons itself was still owned by a three-way partnership that included Donna Kaye, Don's widow. Neither Gygax nor Blume had the money to buy her out. Blume persuaded Gygax to allow his father, Melvin Blume, to purchase Donna Kaye's shares. These were converted to 200 shares in TSR Hobbies. Brian also bought an additional 140 shares. Those purchases reduced Gygax from majority to minority shareholder. In 1980, Brian persuaded Gygax to allow his brother Kevin to buy Melvin's shares. This gave the Blume brothers a controlling interest. By 1981, Gygax and the Blumes were at loggerheads over the company's management.

  By 1984, TSR grossed $30 million per year but was barely breaking even. The company carried debts of $1.5 million. Gygax blamed the crisis on Kevin Blume's management: excess inventory, overstaffing, too many company cars, and a costly project to dredge a 19th-century shipwreck. He persuaded the board's three outside directors to remove Kevin Blume as president. The vote was 4 to 1, with Brian Blume abstaining. In March 1985, Gygax exercised his 700-share stock option, giving himself 850 shares and majority control. He appointed himself president and CEO and hired a company manager named Lorraine Williams.

  Brian Blume revealed in October 1985 that he had triggered his own 560-share option and sold all of the Blume brothers' shares to Williams. This gave Williams just over 1,000 shares, making her the majority shareholder. Gygax took TSR to court to block the sale. He lost. Williams replaced him as president and CEO. She made clear he would make no further creative contributions to TSR. Several of his projects were immediately shelved. D&D sales reached $29 million in 1985, but Gygax resigned all positions in October 1986. His settlement, signed in December 1986, let him keep the rights to some characters. These included Gord the Rogue and characters whose names were anagrams of his own, such as Yrag and Zagyg. He lost rights to the World of Greyhawk and to all other characters he had created for TSR, including Mordenkainen, Robilar, and Tenser.

  After the Wizards of the Coast purchase, Gygax returned to Dragon Magazine. He wrote the 'Up on a Soapbox' column from Issue 268, in January 2000, through Issue 320, in June 2004.

• 8. Licensing Disputes

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  Early TSR publications borrowed heavily from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. The threat of copyright action from Tolkien Enterprises prompted three name changes. Hobbits became halflings, a term Tolkien had coined but TSR judged non-infringing. Ents became treants. Balrogs became Type VI demons, also known as balors.

  A separate intellectual property problem arose with the 1980 publication Deities & Demigods. Early versions of the manual included material from the Cthulhu Mythos and the Melnibonean Mythos. Those issues were resolved by removing the material from later editions. On the digital front, Wizards of the Coast suspended all PDF sales of D&D products on the 6th of April 2009. The move coincided with a lawsuit against eight people for copyright infringement. In 2013, OneBookShelf resumed selling D&D titles through a new partnership with Wizards. In 2016, the Dungeon Masters Guild launched as a digital storefront. By 2019, the Guild allowed third-party creators to publish material based on settings including Ravenloft, Eberron, and Ravnica.

  In December 2009, Hasbro filed suit against Atari. Hasbro claimed Atari had breached its D&D licensing agreement by selling its European distribution business to Namco Bandai Partners without authorization. Hasbro alleged that Atari had sub-licensed part of its exclusive D&D rights and that Namco Bandai had obtained confidential D&D information from Atari. Atari claimed Hasbro was trying to unfairly reclaim rights it had already granted. On the 15th of August 2011, Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, and Atari announced a settlement. Digital licensing rights for D&D returned to Hasbro.

  In October 2020, Dragonlance co-creators Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman filed suit against Wizards of the Coast. They alleged Wizards had breached a 2017 licensing deal for a new trilogy of Dragonlance novels. The company had canceled the project in August 2020. In December 2020, Weis and Hickman voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice. Their publishing agent confirmed shortly after that a new trilogy was planned. In December 2021, the first novel in the new series, Dragonlance: Dragons of Deceit, was announced for release on the 9th of August 2022.