HOW WE WON THE WAR ON DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS

From the always entertaining (if not always so illuminating) sf blog io9.com comes this intriguing tale of how one of the geekiest hobbies in the history of hobbydom became an intense focus of opprobrium from the Catholic and evangelical communities. It begins...

When I was in sixth grade, D&D was pretty much the only fun thing to do at lunch. My friends and I would hide away in a little-used corridor leading to the backdoor of a classroom, far from the jerkoffs playing tetherball or freaking out on the parallel bars or whatever the hell people did who weren't on an important quest. I was always a half-elf thief with 18 charisma, because I was eleven years old and that made perfect sense. We made our way through all the weirdest, most absurdly difficult dungeon modules available — like the one where you go inside a crashed spaceship and meet Cthulhu bunnies, or another featuring thousands of levels of hell and psionic battles with spider demons. We heard rumors about how some kids weren't allowed to play D&D...

Keep on reading at io9.com. It's a pretty good history, and I've got some posts in the works on the serious occult influence on role playing games, most especially Chaosium and Sandy Petersen's ground-breaking cream of the RPG crop, Call of Cthulhu.