Tuesday, March 21, 2023

RPGs: How the Techniques of Psychological Warfare Went Mainstream

 

As with the West Memphis Three and the Satanic Panic, everything you've been told by the corporate media about the "Dungeons and Dragons Panic" is a malicious mixture of half-truth, shameless distortion and flat-out lies. 



The fact is that - like so much of our so-called "popular culture" - RPGs have their roots in military intelligence, and have unleashed a well-documented but underreported epidemic of crippling psychological dissociation on entire generations. 

Which is why I'm happy to announce a summit with my man Recluse (of the must-read VISUP blog) where we will shine a light on the secret history of RPGs. 

Dissolving your own psyche and immersing an altered ego in elaborate war-gaming may be just harmless fun and games for most, but there has been a serious, sizable and well-documented trail of bloody corpses in the RPGs' wake. 

And the long-term effect of subjecting already-marginal personas and feeble minds to the techniques of psychological warfare is something you'll never hear about in deceitful corporate mouthpieces like Buzzfeed or Vice.

Take it away, Recluse:

The Farm & The Secret Sun Institute Present: The Secret History of RPGs Part I 
It is with unbelievable pleasure that I'm hear to announce a joint Farm/Secret Sun Institute collaboration. The great Christopher Knowles and I will be taking the deepest dive of them all into the history of role-playing-games (RPGs) and related tropes (LARPing, first-person shooters, etc). 

While long dismissed as harmless, the amount of curious deaths linked to the RPGs, going back to D & D, is staggering. And things only got stranger from there. Over the next 40 + years they've been used to invoke pre-historic warrior cults, Lovecraftian entities and other sinister forces in a proto-hypestition fashion. 

By the '90s, full-blown cults grew out of the games, most notably Vampire: The Masqueradeand a certain cult in Kentucky it spawned. Inevitably, the body count continued to rise. We'll explore this subject with Farm/Secret Sun Institute Patreons over a pair of live streams, starting on 3/25/23 (Saturday). The festivities will start @ 9:23 pm EST. I'm up first and trust me, you don't want to miss this presentation.