This is the game that the Moral Guardians warned you about: that evil devil bargaining, magick using, demon invoking vile brainsucking game that convinces you that the walls between reality and fantasy are thinner than you think.
When Patricia Pulling founded Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons, it is this game that she was envisioning. A game that tells players that they can step into a fantasy world and that the two worlds can affect each other.
...but...
You already do this every day. You live in a fantasy world of your own design, drifting through a harsh and uncaring reality within this bubble of delusion. Every day you trick yourself and deceive yourself and believe your own lies about the nature of reality and the meaning of life. Every one of us lives inside a fantasy.
What Patricia Pulling so feared, was that people might choose fantasy worlds of which she did not approve, and over which the dominant hierarchy and mythology held no power. These moral guardians feared that you might tell your own stories, that you might escape the judgement of bronze age storm gods and the moral oppression of nomadic goat herders who hadn't yet invented toilet paper.
So this is a dangerous book. Clearly, a rebellious book now sits in your eager little hands. This book is a game, yes, but so is life. And, in fact, they are the same game.
So how brave to you feel?
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