There’s nothing Stranger Things’ Hellfire Club loves more than an epic Dungeons & Dragons adventure but the real history of the board game is as dark and mysterious as in fiction. So get into character and fire up your imagination. Here are five SPYSCAPE secrets about the real D&D game.

‍

‍

1. Racism & stereotypes‍

Soon after US designers Gary Gygax and David Arneson unleashed D&D in 1974, early editions were criticized for perceived racism. Supplements like Oriental Adventures and Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures were also called out for using problematic tropes of ethnic groups. Has much changed? D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast issued an apology in September 2022 after releasing Spelljammer. Only a month earlier, they’d issued Arcana: Character Origins requesting fan feedback on the issue of race. The thorny conversation hasstarted. 

‍

‍

2. D&D’s life and death scenarios 

D&D has been negatively perceived as promoting suicide among players but is its reputation deserved? In 1979, 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert III, a child prodigy, left a suicide note and went missing for a month. Private investigator William Dear heard rumors that Dungeons & Dragons players used the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University to play a live-action D&D version of the game and found evidence that Egbert may have entered the tunnels to commit suicide. The boy eventually contacted the investigator and returned but later shot himself to death. It transpired that academic and parental pressure - combined with drug use - led to Egbert’s suicide attempts rather than the role-playing game.

‍

‍

‍

3. Satanic panic 

Religious groups in the ‘80s also accused D&D of encouraging Satanic ritual abuse as a ‘Satanic Panic’ gripped the US and parts of the UK, and Canada. In 1982, Patricia Pulling, whose son shot himself to death, believed the suicide was linked to D&D. Pulling sued her son’s school and D&D. She also formed Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD) in 1983, complaining that the game taught demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, insanity, and sex perversion. None of the allegations held up in analysis or in court, however. Gygax told 60 Minutes: "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.“ Pulling died of cancer in 1997 and BADD disbanded.

‍

4. Battle of the Wizard Masters

Corporate infighting in America is nothing new but what happens when the battle is between Wizard Masters? Gary Gygax and David Arneson’s decade-long falling out over who actually created D&D is analyzed by gaming historian Jon Peterson in Game Wizards. Peterson studied court documents, letters, and other original sources of material. He ultimately believes D&D was a group effort but lays bare Arneson's acrimonious departure and challenges to TSR, while chronicling TSR's reckless expansion and the debilitating corporate infighting that led to Gygax's losing control over D&D. As adventure stories go, this one’s epic. Wired describes it as “the ultimate Geek war”.

‍

5. Prison ban‍

Wisconsin's Waupun Prison banned D&D claiming it promoted gang-related activity and the Idaho State Correctional Institution went one step further with a blanket ban on all role-playing games. Outraged, prisoner Kevin T. Singer sued Waupun Prison, arguing that his rights were violated by the ban and the prison’s decision to confiscate his game, books, and the 96-page manuscript he’d created. Singer, sentenced to life in 2002 for bludgeoning and stabbing his sister’s boyfriend to death, lost his D&D case in the Appeals Court in 2010, The New York Times reported. While the judges did not find evidence that D&D promoted gang activity, they ruled that the prison’s decision was ‘rationally related’ to its goal of prison safety and rehabilitation.