Paperbacks from Hell [N.F. - Literature, Art]

Toll of the Dice

“Last night I cast my first spell…this is real power!”

“Which spell did you cast, Debbie?”

“I used the mind bondage spell on my father. He was trying to stop me from playing D&D….He just bought me $200 worth of new D&D figures and manuals. It was great!”

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 1984, the year Jack Chick published his infamous anti-RPG (role-playing game) tract Dark Dungeons, claiming that these dice-and-paper games were a gateway to satanism and suicide. But the moral lather that Chick and groups like B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons) worked themselves into stemmed from a very real tragedy: the suicide of a child prodigy named James Dallas Egbert III.

First, the facts. In 1979, Egbert disappeared from his dorm room at Michigan State University and was traced to the steam tunnels that ran beneath the campus. There the trail went cold. His parents hired private investigator and tireless self-promoter William Dear to look into the case. Dear knew that Egbert played Dungeons and Dragons, and he heard that some of the Michigan State students LARPed in the steam tunnels (LARP stands for live-action role-playing, a type of game in which costumed players interact in character.) Dear knew absolutely zilch about D&D, so he told a reporter that the game might have had something to do with the disappearance. That was all the press needed to declare Egbert a victim of a D&D game “gone wrong,” igniting a media maelstrom.

It turns out the only monster in this book is ill-informed writing. Credit 57

Egbert showed up six months later living in Louisiana under an assumed name, but by then Dear’s colorful version of events had taken hold and two relevant books were already on their way to market. The first was from Rona Jaffe, the extremely famous author who, back in 1958, had published the proto–Sex and the City best seller The Best of Everything. Her subsequent Mazes and Monsters (1981), released in the wake of the Egbert scandal, was a book about RPGs written by an author who knew nothing about them—and cared even less.

Jaffe did mint two conventions that became staples of RPG panic books. The first was that each player turns to RPGs because something is broken inside them (usually, divorced parents are to blame). The other is that the games are deeply silly. (“Kate was Glacia, the fighter, Jay Jay was Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, a Sprite, and Robbie was Pardieu, a Holy Man.”) Mazes and Monsters is best remembered today for its TV movie adaptation, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role, as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York before trying to jump off the World Trade Center.

Will a D&D-type game make a high school student more popular, or more murdery? The answer won’t surprise you. Credit 58

It’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to make a quick buck off a young person’s alleged suicide attempt, you should at least be entertaining. Jaffe broke that rule, but John Coyne would not repeat her mistake with his Hobgoblin (1981).

Protagonist Scott Gardiner is exactly the kind of kid Jaffe warned us was vulnerable to RPGs’ lurid lure: brilliant, creative, socially awkward, and with a dead dad. He’s also into a truly terrible RPG called Hobgoblin that may be only slightly less ridiculous than Mazes and Monsters. In a deeply unrealistic touch, Scott became wildly popular after introducing this RPG to Spencertown, his fancy boarding school. But as the story begins, he’s not popular anymore. After his dad died (while Scott was playing Hobgoblin, of course) he was sent to public school, where his skill as the 25th level paladin, Brian Boru, makes him not an object of admiration, but a creep.

After ambling along like a slow-moving character study for eighteen chapters, the book delivers a gibbering, blood-drenched climax at the school’s Halloween dance as almost every secondary character is gruesomely slaughtered. In a brief epilogue, Scott decides that murdering a man makes him a grown-up and he no longer needs to play Hobgoblin. Ironically, while Jaffe and Coyne posited RPGs as an escape from reality, they’re the ones running from the truth, fabricating a fear of games that hadn’t harmed anybody, based on false information about a missing person case. Who’s the hobgoblin now?