The author notes that fears about Satanists abducting children were actually about “a changing economy in which both parents frequently worked required Americans to rely increasingly on strangers to care for and raise their children” (106). At a time when American culture was obsessed with brainwashing and harbored anti-religious feelings to anything that was not Christianity, moral entrepreneurs, such as William Dear and Rona Jaffe, profited by sensationalizing a game that they only had a surface-level understanding of. Moral entrepreneurs-those who made their living on invoking fear-started to use D&D as both a source and product of these artificial problems.

The development of D&D, he finds, coincided with the rise of obsession over occultism, satanism, and the fear of a valueless generation. The first part of Laycock’s book traces the history of this panic from its creation in the 1970s through the end of the 20th century. Although many have enjoyed D&D for what it is-a game-there are those, “moral entrepreneurs,” as Laylock puts it, who have used its popularity to monetarily and socially benefit from creating panic over an exaggerated connection between the game and the devil. Its popularity, as Laycock addresses, is double-sided.

Dungeons and Dragons, one of the most famous fantasy tabletop role-playing games, has been played by countless individuals and has amassed over a billion dollars in sales since its creation in 1974. Joseph Laycock’s Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion and Imagined Worlds asks us to put down our Bibles and Player’s Handbooks to examine the unnecessary panic over an innocent yet meaningful game.

Vampires Today by Joseph Laycock