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This booklet skips the page numbering on the front of the first page and starts it on the back, possibly making it the only book in history that has the odd numbers on the left side, and the even numbers on the right.

Page 1

Here, a list of suicides are presented, with location, race, sex, and date of death for each. These are the names that were usually the first ones trotted out when the 'dangers' of D&D were discussed. Along with them, we get some supplemental data - all were white males between the ages of 12 and 18, three were honor or gifted students, all deaths but one involved a weapon, and - the most curious coincidence of all - half of these deaths occurred on a full moon.

The significance that the lunar phase has on these deaths is briefly elaborated upon in this booklet, when the topic of lycanthropy comes up. That's right - BADD is suggesting here that a  portion of these deaths (possibly as many as half of them) happen because D&D players are led to believe that they are werewolves.

James Dallas Egbert III was a child prodigy who was attending college at the age of 16, had incredible amounts of pressure to succeed from his family, and was secretly a homosexual and drug addict. His suicide attempts were not connected to Dungeons & Dragons, but the private investigator who took his case did not reveal this for several years after his death, once the book about the case was released, in order to protect Egbert's family from a tarnished reputation. When he finally succeeded in killing himself, he had not played Dungeons & Dragons for about a year, which hardly qualifies him as being 'heavily involved' in the game. This is the case that began the entire controversy over D&D. To learn more, visit the Basic Gaming FAQ.

Michael P. Dempsey committed suicide with a handgun in his bedroom on May 19th, 1981. Few details about the circumstances surrounding his death are available, as the only source of information is Dempsey's father, who is strongly against the game. His father claims to have seen Michael summoning actual D&D demons into his room before his death, and described the odors of sulfur and garlic (which he claims are part of a demon summoning ritual) after his death.

Irving Lee ('Bink') Pulling III was BADD founder Patricia Pulling's son. Bink was known for having a few emotional problems - he used to run around the back yard, howling at the moon, and right before his suicide, it is believed he viciously killed several family pets. After his suicide, a police investigator asked Pulling if her family worshipped the devil, and showed her the Dungeons & Dragons books and notes in Bink's collection, which she knew nothing about. (So much for being 'heavily involved' in D&D!) This was very likely the seed that was planted in Pulling's mind and began to grow into a vast Satanic conspiracy of secret murders and suicides. Pulling would later claim that a curse put on Bink's character in a school D&D game drove him to kill himself, but when questioned, none of the members of the school group knew of such a curse. To learn more, visit the Basic Gaming FAQ.

Harold T. Collins did not commit suicide, he died in a failed attempt at auto-erotic asphyxiation. Dungeons & Dragons does not condone or even mention this type of activity. Therefore, this death is not connected with D&D at all.

Daniel E. and Stephen (Steven) R. Erwin (sources on this case never seem to agree on the spelling of the younger brother's name) were brothers who carried out a suicide pact together. Daniel, the older brother, was facing sentencing for auto theft, and was extremely afraid of the criminal justice system. The Erwin parents have always maintained that D&D had nothing to do with the death of their sons, and were enraged when a 60 Minutes story connecting the two was aired in September of 1985.

"THE DEATHS ABOVE DO NOT REFLECT ALL SUICIDES, DEATHS AND ATTEMPTED SUICIDES DUE TO DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS" - This was a mantra for Pulling and her group, the claim that hundreds of these deaths were really happening under our noses, but no one was reporting on it. The fact is, for suicide within a group as large as D&D players to even be a problem, there would have to be thousands of successful attempts, and nearly twenty times as many failed attempts. For more on the suicide statistic fallacy, visit the Basic Gaming FAQ.

Page 2

If there are sources on which of these bans were real, and which were manufactured by BADD, I haven't found them. At the time, it was fairly simple to get a school board to ban something simply by invoking satanism and suicide, so it's possible that most or even all of these are legitimate. It would be very interesting (at least for me, anyway) to see a comparison between schools that banned D&D in the 1980s and schools that ban Harry Potter today.