RPG A Day 2020--Day 8: Shade

 RPG a Day 2020: Day 8—Shade

This is a tough one. I’m going to look at shade as a place outside of the sunlight or else in relative darkness. RPGs—and other “geeky” hobbies were in the shade for a long time…most of my life in fact. 

If you weren’t around in the 80’s, then you missed whole “Satanic Panic” one of the few times that RPGs—particularly Dungeons and Dragons—had the spotlight shining directly on them. Most, if not all, of that publicity was negative. It’s all well document and I leave it to the reader and the search engine of their choice should they wish to read more about it. I was a kid during that time, so it remains interesting to me.

Apart from one horrid year in Alabama, my childhood was spent in slightly less horrid conditions in Georgia. I remember as a very young kid when the D&D cartoon came out that a parent from up the street thought that it was devil worship. They were okay with He-Man, but not D&D. This is around the same time that I have the possible ‘Mandella Effect’ memory of buying a D&D thieves supplemental when my brother and I made a first—failed—attempt at playing. Apart from that, there really weren’t many opportunities to play.

When I made it to the teen years, most of the time I was running for my brother and one of his friends—I’m four years older than he is, and if I remember correctly, the friend was even younger than that. We mostly did superhero or wrestling based games. The ‘satanic’ shade had pretty much been lifted but the nerd/geeky uncool shade was still around. Eventually, my brother would have lost interest and we moved from his little friend. My RPG aspirations would go to video games exclusively until I finally got out of high school. 

Way back in my RPGaDay ramblings I talked about my gaming during those years.   You could look in my archives if my writing is appealing to you, but I won’t re-recount things here. It just feels so strange today for persons of my age or older to see the hobby that was once so obscure and something we did in the shadows that you wanted to keep secret become something that is completely main stream.