When satanic panic swept through Utah, a beloved game took the fall

A purple dragon observes a group of travelers — a monk, bard, three rogues and a paladin — that has come into its swamp. The group has been hired by a postdoctoral gnome researcher to accompany him as he looks for new samples of magical plants and creatures.

The dragon has a harsh accent, and it calls the travelers “two-legged appetizers” as it menacingly hovers over them.

This scene isn’t unfolding on a big screen or the stage of a theatrical production. Instead, it plays out around a table at Salt Lake City sci-fi bookstore The Legendarium. The dragon, known in this imaginary world as Aithairth, is played by a woman with ice-blue hair.

Petra Emmer, the mind behind Aithairth, spins up an immersive world during this campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game that is now in its 50th year of gathering people.

The Beehive State’s reception of D&D, as it’s affectionately known, has evolved since the game hit shelves five decades ago. It was targeted early on by one school district urged to root out the devil’s work, but is today a course at the state’s flagship university. Along the way, it’s created accessible places for queer Utahns to express themselves.

In this role-playing game, players can become anyone or anything. All that’s needed to play is a list of characters, a pen or pencil, dice, a tabletop and a robust imagination.

At The Legendarium, Emmer is a dungeon master, meaning she controls the overall story narrative, although the other players also contribute. A roll of the game’s famous 20-sided dice decides whether the characters stay put or blow away into the wind when Aithairth flaps its massive wings.

“I’m going to have them meet this really strange dragon that will cause them to have to rethink what they know about dragons,” Emmer said. “I’m setting up an adventure that gives these people who wouldn’t normally encounter each other a reason to meet … this game does the same for me.”

Satanic panic’s grip on Utah

Emmer’s introduction to D&D came in the early 80s, when her parents played with some of their friends.

“They would get together at our house in the evenings, every couple weeks, and have these games in the living room,” Emmer said. “My brothers and I would just sit there on the stairs, listening to them playing.”

Back then, Emmer was drawn to the captivating storytelling as a 10-year-old interested in fantasy. Eventually, her parents’ friends helped Emmer and her brothers start their own campaigns.

“These groups were really small because we were not Mormon, and we were the only non-Mormons on our street,” Emmer said. " … All of our friends, their parents had told them they weren’t allowed to play that game.”

In the late 1970s and early 80s, satanic panic — a mass moral alarm that alleged devilish influence through media like music, books and games — captured the nation, sweeping up Utah in its midst. In fact, one fabricated story from a Utah author about a Pleasant Grove teenager contributed to the panic.

In 1980, satanic panic gripped Heber City after two Wasatch County School District employees, Cecil Black and Mike Tunnell, introduced D&D to students in an after-school club, according to a Facebook post from the Wasatch County Library.

“And soon ... a simple game used to enhance a child’s education and imagination was blown out of proportion,” the post states, “and there was a great divide in our community.”

Many parents were concerned about depictions of devils and monsters in some of the game’s manuals.

Winston Lee, owner of Heber’s Lee Music, grew up and went to school in the small mountain town, and distinctly remembers the panic era. He played the game with his brother and Black, a middle school teacher who read fantasy books like “The Hobbit” with different character voices.

“We went to the first club meeting .. and we had a blast,” Lee said. “We were so excited to go back and play Dungeons and Dragons again … and then it was canceled.”

That year, after outcry from concerned parents, the Wasatch School District’s board of education held a public meeting, where Black and Tunnell explained the game. A representative from its publisher, Tactical Studies Rules, also attended.

Tracy Hickman, a Utah fantasy author with over 60 published titles, was there. “... For me, it came to encapsulate the whole problem of the panic,” Hickman said.

Hickman vividly recalls the details, like hearing the company’s representative.

“He stood up and he said, ‘There’s nothing going on in these role-playing games that is a problem and to show you how innocent all of this is, I am going to cast a D&D spell right here for you,’” Hickman said. “Which, in game terms, means that he’s going to look up a rule and he’s going to roll some dice to see if it succeeds.”

Hickman said the representative rolled the dice and noted that nothing happened, then invited people in the crowd to come cast a spell themselves. A woman “filled with fierce faith” stood up, Hickman remembers, and told the man, “‘Of course it didn’t work. I’m filled with the Holy Ghost.’”

At the end of that meeting, the board decided to allow the club to remain intact but told the leaders to toss the devil-depicting manuals.

The club’s survival, however, was short-lived. Not long after that meeting, The New York Times chronicled, mounting pressure from parents had led the district to ban the club.

Utah’s influence on D&D

Hickman, introduced to D&D by his wife, Laura, was hooked and spent some of his student loan money at Brigham Young University to buy some of its first advanced editions, and the couple began to write their own adventures. An adventure is a scenario for players; a campaign is a series of adventures.

Later, when money was tight and they could barely afford shoes for their children, they saw D&D’s manufacturer “would pay $500 for an adventure, which, at the time sounded to us like all the money in the world,” Hickman said, “so we sent our copies of the adventures we had published so far.”

The family’s phone had been disconnected, so the company called their neighbor’s phone to offer to buy their adventures and offer Tracy Hickman a job as a game designer. Two of the Hickmans’ stories became the classic D&D adventures Rahasia (in which players seek to rescue a kidnapped elf maiden) and Pharaoh (in which players search for items to break a curse).

The Hickmans also created the Gothic horror Ravenloft campaign and became influential D&D writers who shifted the game toward more cerebral and visually detailed adventures.

Hickman, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said anytime the company got “materials critical of D&D,” it would send them to him, especially if they “dealt with LDS culture.”

“I remember them giving me a tape one time by some speaker that was popular in youth groups in Utah at the time, because he was talking about how evil Dungeons and Dragons was, and how good LDS people should never indulge in such a game,” Hickman said. “I found that distasteful, because I was [and] am a good LDS member, and I play D&D.”

A sign of how Utah’s attitude has changed: Last year, a group at a Provo mall set a record for the world’s largest D&D game.

At the University of Utah, Maria Alberto, who researches fan studies and tabletop role-playing games, teaches a D&D English class. Game co-creator Gary Gygax made a list of fantasy and science fiction books that inspired him, and the first half of her class explores those works.

The second half reviews books written about the game and novels inspired by it. At a recent class, students examined “Daughter of the Drow” by Elaine Cunningham, and asked questions about the fantasy novel — like what about it has been adopted as part of the game.

”That’s the approach of this class,” Alberto said, “thinking about the relationship between texts, literature and the game system and the cultural phenomena we have today.”

A place for exploration

At The Legendarium, the crowd is joyfully chaotic as people play D&D multiple times a week. Laughter echoes off the wooden shelves and flooring. Stephanie Novak and her friends play an offshoot version of D&D called Daggerheart on the first floor.

The group shares life updates with one another as Novak pulls up notes on past games. They each pull out their own set of colorful dice, prepared for a night of fantastical escape.

“Dice are there,” Novak said, “to kind of help introduce chance.”

AJ Uehling savors how she gets “to sit around a table with my friends and spend time collaboratively solving problems that [are] low stakes,” she said, and “the way that we are able to feel really proud of ourselves and come up with an absolutely wild left-field solution … it’s your ability to be creative and to use your own problem-solving that actually drives the story forward.”

One floor below Novak’s game of Daggerheart, another D&D game is underway, this one inspired by Percy Jackson, the main character of a Greek mythology-inspired book series by Rick Riordan.

The co-dungeon masters for the game have thrown a curveball: there’s an explosion at the gas station where the players are, and a sound behind a nearby dumpster needs to be investigated. Each player displays a card listing their real and character names, along with their preferred pronouns.

Emory Ogaard first started playing D&D at The Legendarium, and while they have since moved to Oregon, the people they played with in Utah remain close friends.

“About 90% of our table was nonbinary or gender-nonconforming in some way,” Ogaard said, “and that was really unusual to me in that I’d never had that before, and it was really special.”

Ogaard, a historian of gender and sexuality, said players of tabletop games like D&D were often ostracized, so people who were on “the outside of society” were able to flock to them. There’s a distinct cultural connection between tabletop role-playing games and the LGBTQ community, Ogaard said.

“It’s expected that you’re playing something potentially different from yourself,” they said. “So for queer people, many of us discover our own sexualities or gender variances” through games.

Utah has an “incredibly nerdy” community (the state has a particular affinity for fantasy authors, after all) that intersects with the queer community, Ogaard said.

“Look at Legendarium,” they said, “It’s a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore, first and foremost, and it’s interesting that it has easily become one of the queerest places in the entire county.”

Tabletop role-playing, Ogaard said, “removes all of those social pressures that limit us from being who we really want to be. It gives people that ability to suspend disbelief, and in so doing, feel like they can live who they really are.”

Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.