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Comment by sonofhans | Hacker News Reader

I experienced this first-hand. In the 80s I want to a Christian high school in Ohio[0] (funnily enough, I was classmates with Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson). We had chapel once a week with some visiting preacher/lecturer. Several of them railed very explicitly against D&D.

One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.

There was a series of books some of us read, young adult fiction (can’t recall or find the title), where some of the characters played D&D, lost their minds due to the devil’s curse, and died in awful ways.

I played anyway, of course, just not with friends from school.

0. https://www.heritagechristianschool.org/

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> Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.

I am envisioning a scenario where the game starts to get popular quickly and McKinsey is called in to help scale up the satan dedications, because the witch is low on bandwidth.

That’s a great image. I can almost see the brochure selling it to middle managers.

It reminds me of this Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland novel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O. They posit time-traveling witches as a service in the context of a tech startup. It’s a fun idea, but not a great book; middle-of-the-road even for Stephenson’s later work.

I enjoyed the first one, but was unhappy with it not really being wrapped up.

>Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson

That's a cool anecdote, he seems like a very resilient character from that era.

I'm very surprised he hasn't been canceled[0] though, considering he had many relationships that would not pass the #metoo test and literally used the N-word in his songs.

[0] Not that I would necessarily wish that on him, it's just that him having a career is fascinating in the same sense a dinosaur who somehow survived an extinction event would be.

Isn't he being sued for sexual assault and other crimes?

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/marilyn-ma...

I’ve wondered that, too. I’m not sure he’s relevant enough to be cancelled anymore. Reminds me of this — https://www.theonion.com/marilyn-manson-now-going-door-to-do...

But as other comments have pointed out, he is being sued (again). So maybe that will do it.

I’m mystified at what some people are able to get away with, and what gets other cancelled for life. I wonder of MLK or Gandhi could survive the climate today. And then wonder again how sociopaths like Trump seemingly get away with it forever.

>One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.

I'm always saddened by people who so very desperately want something - attention, to feel in power, to feel better informed than others, etc - that they'll buy into and repeat these conspiracy theories. In the 80s I used to play D & D at a game store that hosted an event and we'd start Friday night and on a really rollicking session go through until dawn. It was amazing. IMHO the camaraderie, friendship and entertainment that came from a bunch of people playing pretend for a few hours was what D & D was meant to be. That some people projected their own weird fantasies of darkness and evil onto a game just makes me what goes on in their heads. The only darkness and evil in our game was occasional bad guys. Except that one guy who played a Chaotic Evil wizard. Eventually the GM added game rules that warned everyone prior to his casting anything, particularly behind the party. But even that was all in good fun.

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