The Devil's Game: Luke Gygax on Growing Up Inside the Satanic Panic
Bulletproof vests, death threats, and the night his mother followed a suspicious car
I was ten years old the first time someone handed me a set of polyhedral dice in a basement in Fort Collins.
I didn’t know what I was walking into. I just knew the room felt different from everywhere else I’d been. The story only cared what you did next — not how you sounded doing it, not what class they’d put you in, not where you’d come from. For a kid who’d been classified, sorted, and told exactly what he was, that mattered more than I had words for.
That was 1982. The same year church groups were burning D&D books in parking lots across America and preachers were warning parents that the game was a gateway to the devil.
I didn’t know any of that at ten. I just knew the basement.
The Church of Dungeons & Dragons is the book I’ve been building toward my entire career without knowing it. It’s a book about belonging — about why this game has quietly saved people that conventional structures missed, and why it keeps doing it. It’s in negotiations with a major publisher right now. The reporting is already underway.
And the conversations I’ve been having — with the people who built this game, survived its darkest moments, and used it to put broken people back together — are too extraordinary to sit in a hard drive while we wait for a publication date.
So I’m releasing them here as they happen.
Colorado Switchblade Special Projects — a new YouTube channel dedicated to raw interviews and field reporting from the book’s research. This is the reporting being built in real time. You’re invited along for the ride.
The first one is up now.
A few weeks ago at Gary Con 2026 — the annual convention held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where Dungeons & Dragons was born — I sat down with Luke Gygax.
Gary Gygax’s son. The kid who grew up inside the house while the culture tried to burn it down.
What he described wasn’t what I expected.
Bulletproof vests. An armed driver. A six-foot fence around the family home. A pack of Malamute Huskies running loose at night as an early warning system. Motion detectors. Guns in every room.
Cars driving slowly past the house. His mother following one of them — and finding not a threat, but a devoted fan who simply wanted to see where Gary Gygax lived.
“It seems ludicrous today,” Luke told me, “that people actually thought Dungeons and Dragons was from the devil. But it was real.”
The deepest irony — the one Luke delivers with perfect dry understatement — is that his father and the whole family were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The organization had officially condemned D&D. The man who invented the game was a member of a church that called it Satanic.
“He’s like,” Luke said, “well, that’s weird. I’m a Jehovah’s Witness.”
This is the Satanic Panic from the only angle that actually matters.
Watch it here:
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~ JVT
Colorado Switchblade | The Church of Dungeons & Dragons