A Little Dungeons Dragons Advocacy
I need your webhounding skills, but we'll get to that in a moment. Twice in the last week, as I've been sitting at my drawing table at Dragons Keep, customers have come in asking, in essence, "what's all the fuss about D&D?" Specifically, it seems, they want to know why other parents are dead-set against letting their children play such an insidiously dangerous game, which is obviously training them for occultism, satanism, and weekend baby-eating. And here I thought those issues all got put to bed back in, oh, 1983. D&D is no more a training ground for occultists, satanists, and baby-eaters than American Idol is (note: I use "American Idol" as my example rather than "Survivor" because, well... the baby-eating episode of "Survivor" is going to air any day now). Still, people have questions. As the closest thing to an actual grown-up present in the store (being in the store prevents me, by definition, from being a TRUE grown-up) it seems to fall on me to answer their questions. While I can be fairly encyclopedic in my summonings of obscure and arcane trivia, I suspect that when Mrs. Smith tells Mrs. Jones "the guy drawing stuff at the comic book store said it's okay because..." all of my pontificating will fall rather flat in the retelling. So... do you know any good sites with TRULY encyclopedic advocacy for Dungeons & Dragons in specific, and Fantasy Role-Playing in general? I'm looking for something I can summarize, synopsize, and print out -- complete with links and footnotes -- so that the next time someone asks the question I can say "D&D is as safe as any other activity that takes place at your kitchen table" and then hand them a nice sheet of paper that allows them to refute the absurd allegations bandied about by their ignorant and fearful neighbors. I've found a little material already, but I'm sure there are things I'm missing... like perhaps an under-utilized, low-Google-ranked site that already has EXACTLY what I want, formatted and ready to go. Failing that, send me the raw feed. On your mark, get set, roll initiative...