This was really a crazy time, fresh off of a landslide Reagan victory and no doubt the moral hysteria boosted by it, I remember this situation really well.

My parents (mostly my mother) are very religious and I remember being driven around town with the local Christian radio station on and it being just wall-to-wall fear mongering about Satanism, backmasking in rock songs and D&D. Just endless talk, hour after hour, about how all this will lead your child to drugs, pornography, satanism and suicide -- numerous "concrete" examples were included as the local Christian "research team" swept the country (pre-internet! so most of it was probably just invented whole-cloth) for police reports and court records for Satanic rituals, Rock music and D&D. All reported with deep urgency and absolute truthful authority between gentle praise songs I heard in church every Sunday. Of course they'd never play a couple seconds of Led Zeppelin back and forth so you could hear the hidden messages revealed, lest you want to kill yourself during the next commercial break or continuous praise song power hour.

Terse descriptions of D&D were provided. "A game where players assume the roles of various characters, demons are involved, sometimes, like gambling, dice are used!" without any cultural context about how it's exactly like any other game where people assume different identities, like Cowboys & Indians, or super space spy or whatever.

It was a perfect storm of cultural events simultaneously pumped up by various social moralists who, like most groups like this, take tiny kernels of truth and wrap them in heaping piles of agendas, fabrications and outright lies and blanket every form of sensory input to drive the masses into full foaming at the mouth hysteria.

The publicity eventually leaked out into regular media and I remember seeing some of these "issues" (which had all been masterfully woven together into a single moral crisis by the religious media my mother listened to) break into the regular nightly news my father forced me to sit and watch every evening (to build culture and character).

My mother was absolutely obsessed with all this and was driven to hysteria. One time pulling the car over to the side of a busy highway and making me promise, promise, I'd never roll D&D dice and risk letting Satan into my heart - tears streaming down her face while she shook like a leaf -- because I might commit suicide when the game is over. She'd listen to hour after hour of pronouncements of how the country was going to sin...I'd watch her cleaning the kitchen while this played on the radio, her scrubbing getting more and more vigorous as her emotions became more and more upset.

Even at the tender age of...6 or 7, I knew the entire thing was a ridiculous pile of malarkey. I honestly had no clue what D&D was, had only heard rock music in passing (my music selection was pretty heavily regulated) and certainly wasn't involved in Satanism of any kind. I was more concerned with the severe mental instability this seemed to be drawing out in my mother...who seemed to be the only person I knew who couldn't separate fantasy from reality in this situation.

When the D&D cartoon started airing, curious, I'd sneak a few minutes of it in, titillated that something so dangerous was in cartoon form and on television before bed time. The show was pretty tame so I usually got bored and turned it off and did something else with my time. (He-Man was also banned in my house).

I vaguely remember the acronym BADD from those times and the name Patricia Pulling, and the claim that players would get so wrapped up in the fantasy of their characters, with reality and imagination so tangled up, that when your character died, there was some non-trivial chance you would go out and kill yourself, with probably a recently listened to Led Zeppelin tape in the boom box and with some kind of Satanic connection, or sacrificed chickens or something nearby.

And suddenly, one day, the Christian "news" sources my mother listened to moved on to something else and it was all over. Rock music was still around, Led Zeppelin was still for sale, D&D was still a game, but apparently the moral crusaders had stopped something and had moved on to something else. I think this was when all the major lawsuits had concluded with BADD losing all of them.

It was still on my banned list, but the hysteria was over. Like most kids I just ignored it and played a little D&D over at my friends' houses till I got bored of it and listened to rock music just the same. Years later, remembering the hysteria, a friend and I figured out how to reverse a cassette tape and we experimented listening for hidden messages in Rock Music cassettes to little success.

The early 1980s were a really weird moment in American history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bothered_About_Dungeons_and_Dr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Rop4Zt-S0