I found this all so mystifying and silly when it was going down. What I mean by silly is the idea that Dungeons and Dragons was essentially a satanic game. It was and is anything but that.

I was pretty much a nerd in high school and didn’t have a lot of friends, but I very much enjoyed playing role playing games with a small cadre of like-minded people. We started out with the classic World War II role playing games available at the time.

It was tremendous fun for us, mostly boys, most of us not at the top of the popularity list. We gathered in each other’s homes, ate pizza, and had a blast.

Several of us were Tolkien fans, being the good nerds that we were.

So when we heard about Dungeons & Dragons, that it combined traditional role-playing gaming techniques with Tolkien’s universe, we were keen to try it.

We never went back to war gaming. D&D was too much fun. (Incidentally, this led to my kissing a girl in the basement before a game and beginning a disastrous heterosexual affair. But I’m not blaming that on demons. Lol!)

When we started hearing Christian condemnation, we were mystified. Tolkien and his buddy CS Lewis were staunch Christians, we thought. We were enjoying adventures in Tolkien territory. But then my church condemned Lewis’s Narnia series as blasphemous, so I wasn’t paying them a lot of mind.

When we read in newspapers that D&D was satanic, we just kept rolling the dice and having fun as Tolkien-esque elves, dwarves, hobbits, and heroes.

And while I haven’t kept up with my high school buddies, last I heard none of us had committed suicide.