Some Funny-Looking Dice: How D&D Saved My Relationship With God From The Satanic Panic

When is being gay like playing Dungeons and Dragons? When you’re condemned to Hell for it. So why not both? This week, Blackwarren founder Vaughn R. Demont talks about how tabletop RPGs informed his faith and his work as a writer.

It’s not every day that your aunt, who was always nice and friendly and invited you over to her house to watch videos with your cousins or out to the park, tells you with no room for misinterpretation that you’re going to Hell. I was seven.

Now, one could assume, given the identity of this publisher, and my own identification as part of the LGBTQ+ community, that I was judged as “a little funny” in childhood, and life was downhill from there. With a lot of people, you’d be correct in making that assumption. It was the 1980s, though, so LGBTQ+ wasn’t a thing, yet, at least not to white suburban kids still in elementary school. There wasn’t an “Owl House”, “He-Man” and “She-Ra” existed to sell toys, and My Little Pony was only starting to influence a young Lauren Faust.

No, this proclamation of my damnation was caused by my sister, who asked me one day while we were visiting my grandparents if I wanted to play a game that used imagination and neat dice.

The ‘80s Were a Wild Time

Michelle Remembers, The Satan Seller, The Amityville Horror, Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, and “Chick Tracts” were encouraging and riding high on the moral panic of the 1970s and 1980s, The Satanic Panic, which terrorized America (read: White Christian America) with the idea that not only were Satanists out there, they were everywhere, and likely was anyone that wasn’t connected to your church. It’s considered humorous in 2023 that we were ever gullible or fear-stricken, especially since the object of my “damnation” is an industry that makes billions a year and finally put out a good movie, so long as you ignore the Pinkertons.

I’m talking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons.

My first character wasn’t my own, it was a level 10 fighting man that my cousin had named “Annihilator” until his mother found out what he was doing, and rather loudly read my uncle the riot act until he agreed to kick his nephew out. “Satan’s Game”, after all, was where children were shown how to sin and blaspheme and hold unholy communion of dead babies and virgin blood.

This left my sister, playing a magic user, with the possibility that the game would end. As she was usually bored, especially if the Atari was still in the attic, and our other uncle could find his ColecoVision, she pulled me into the game and had me play “Annihilator”, a word for which I didn’t know the definition. When our aunt found out, she pleaded to our mother to think twice about letting us play “Satan’s Game” (where my sister and I were playing law-abiding citizens who saved innocent people from monsters).

My mom was a mother of two and had a weekend to herself at her parents’ house. The prospect of her children leaving her alone for 4-5 hours out of every day was, she concluded, worth the possibility of us going to Hell. Also, she found the Satanic Panic ridiculous, as the church we went to primarily focused on bible stories about how awesome God and Jesus were instead of trying to scare us, and that “we are all God’s children” and to deny that meant you were going to Hell. She did end up pulling me out of the game, but only because I was seven and I had a bad nightmare that the house was eaten by Tiamat.

It was a few years before I got back into it and was playing a character that was actually mine. Like with a lot of people, looking at the character years after illuminated that I used him to process a lot of things about my parents’ divorce, so my characters almost always had an absent father figure, or the father was a selfish jerk (seeing a pattern in my books, now?). This idea that playing TTRPGs was going to send me to Hell became more and more ludicrous, especially when I started realizing I wasn’t straight. (Though as the games run by my uncle grew increasingly racist and homophobic, I ended up jumping to White Wolf).

Hell Is Other People

I could explore that at the gaming table without thinking I’d end up in Hell. It was a place I could talk about it, coded as Hell, but still talk about it. I had thought about talking to a pastor after we moved to a new town with a new church, but I’d heard too many sermons about how being gay was a greater sin than genocide, and I stopped attending. Even my mom did (divorce was frowned on severely), and when we spoke about it, the church’s morals and values clashed with her own. Church was no longer a place to feel welcomed and inspired and faithful, it was a place where the world was the Titanic, and as far as they were concerned, they were the only ones with lifeboats.

God was painted as violent and unforgiving, which wasn’t anything like the God I’d grown up learning about. In order to maintain some sort of faith, I had to reevaluate my perception, so I went with the basics: Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnibenevolence. I was brought up to see God as a father figure, and when I was playing TTRPGs, a God was someone you loved and worshipped and called on when all hope was lost. As I grew older, a god was no longer someone you were trying to impress and devote yourself to, but to live right in a way they’d approve of. I concluded that if we were all God’s children, that made God a parent. And eventually, while you love your parent and want to make them proud, you have to demonstrate that you’re doing okay on your own because of what you learned from them and essentially stop relying on them for everything.

So, my characters are self-reliant. They screw up and own up to it. No gods are coming to save them, but it doesn’t damage their faith. Nick Blackwarren is a devout follower of the Fates, but he doesn’t expect everything to go his way, and when it does, he’s grateful, but he also acknowledges the hard work he put in to accomplish it. His identity doesn’t play any part in it. He is the way he is because he was fated to be such, but free will gives that wiggle room for self-determination. In my books. I can shape the world however I want, I know everything that’s going to happen, and I try to make life challenging, but ultimately benevolent, with characters finding a home, finding a purpose, and having friends.

But where would I find welcome and inspiration and fellowship? A kitchen table with some sheets of paper, a few friends, and some funny-looking dice. And no communion necessary, unless you count pizza and Mountain Dew.

Got your own story to tell? Blackwarren’s submissions for manuscripts are still open!