Pages

2018-07-06

Wild Wild Country and D&D

There is a Netflix documentary called Wild Wild Country about the conflict of an Indian Guru coming to Oregon. IMDB describes it with:
When the world's most controversial guru builds a utopian city deep in the Oregon desert, conflict with the locals escalates into a national scandal. A true story.
During Episode Two there is discussion around how this relates to the Jim Jones' Massacre in South America--mostly about how there was a strong anti-cult sentiment in the media. Here is a clip (I removed the sound & went with subtitles):


In any event, to demonstrate this "dangerous cult" point the filmmakers used images from the 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide:




And Players Handbook (one of D&D's Most ICONIC images):



Both books were written by Gary Gygax and are considered classics. They have nothing to do with cults & everything to do with the creative gameplay--in fact, the DMG is still often cited as the greatest RPG book ever written.

There is absolutely no reason to include these images in a discussion of cults--in fact, it perpetuates a Satanic Panic response which still affects RPG's.

No comments:

Post a Comment