Today Dungeons & Dragons is flying high, gushed over by movie stars like Vin Diesel and Wil Wheaton. Dan Harmon plays D&D live onstage, and popular podcasts like Nerd Poker, Critical Hit, and The Adventure Zone take listeners on regular D&D adventures.

But David Ewalt, author of the recent book Of Dice and Men, remembers when things were different. When he first started gaming, back in the early ’80s, the very idea of fantasy role-playing terrified parents and teachers.

“A lot of people just didn’t understand what it was,” Ewalt says in Episode 170 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “People freaked out and thought, ‘This is satanic. What the hell has my kid gotten into?'”

Since rulebooks like the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide contained detailed compendiums of witches, ghosts, and demons, as well as long lists of spells, complete with required ingredients and casting instructions, many parents feared that maybe the monsters and spells were real.

Michael Witwer is the author of Empire of Imagination, the first book-length biography of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. Witwer says the satanism charges are all the more ludicrous given that Gygax was a church-going Jehovah’s Witness.

“This was a guy who had periods of his life where he was going door-to-door, and doing that type of evangelism,” says Witwer. “It’s very interesting that the guy who was being accused of actively promoting satanism was a guy who, at least for a long time, was very faithful.”

Sensationalized news stories fanned the paranoia, and since D&D books were in millions of homes, it was easy to find players whose lives took tragic turns.

The dangerous reputation of Dungeons & Dragons hasn’t faded entirely, and television preachers still sometimes rail against the game. Ironically, the bad press only made D&D more popular with rebellious teens, causing sales to quadruple in the year after the controversy broke.

“It made the game legendary,” says Witwer, “and the game will last forever, as a result of the controversy.”

Listen to our complete interview with David Ewalt and Michael Witwer in Episode 170 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

David Ewalt on Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson:

“It does seem that Dave Arneson was really the first person to come up with the whole idea of, ‘We’re going to explore a dungeon, and we’re having our characters go into these fantasy catacombs under a castle, and we’re going to fight monsters and look for treasure.’ Gary, however, helped come up with the rules for fantasy combat. That was the stuff that Dave Arneson and his friends based their rules on. … It couldn’t have happened without both of them, and it especially couldn’t have happened without Gary’s vision and genius for Dungeons & Dragons as a product. Dave Arneson may have just come up with this fun game that he played with his friends for a while, and other people may have enjoyed it, but it was Gary who was really the visionary, who said, ‘You know what? This is something other people want to play, and other people will pay for. Let’s make a product out of this, let’s make books out of this, let’s start a company.'”

David Ewalt on Lorraine Williams:

“There has been this whole legend built up about how Lorraine came and ruined [D&D publisher TSR], and it was all crap after Gary left, but that’s not really true. … One of the things she did right when she was at the company is that D&D really built out their literary efforts. All the great Dungeons & Dragons novels that are still big and popular today—Robert Salvatore and his Drizzt stories, the Dragonlance series from Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, all those books came out under Lorraine Williams’ reign as CEO. … Drizzt is the most popular character, period, in the Dungeons & Dragons world, and if you love Drizzt, that’s not a TSR creation under Gary Gygax, that’s a TSR creation under Lorraine Williams.”

David Ewalt on fantasy:

“What’s one of the most popular TV shows in the world right now? It’s Game of Thrones. I mean, you have people who, 30 or 40 years ago, would never have read any fantasy, they never picked up a Tolkien book, but now on Sunday nights they’re in front of their TV, and then the next day they’re in the office talking about Game of Thrones with their friends. Fantasy is mainstream, from Game of Thrones to the Lord of the Rings movies, everyone’s into this idea of fantasy now. … It used to be, back in the ’70s, people would pick up those [D&D] rulebooks and be like, ‘Oh my god, it’s a spell book!’ But now people pick up a D&D rulebook and they go, ‘Oh, this is kind of like Game of Thrones. This is awesome. I want to do this.'”