Dagorhir

What happened

Dagorhir began, like so much fantasy of the 1970s, with Tolkien. Bryan Wiese, a young man in the Washington, D.C., area, was reading The Lord of the Rings when he watched Robin and Marian, Richard Lester's 1976 film of an aging Robin Hood. He wanted to capture the adventure of wielding sword and bow for himself. By the group's own account he had never heard of medieval reenactment societies such as the Society for Creative Anachronism, nor of the new game called Dungeons & Dragons.

In 1977 Wiese placed ads on the local radio station WGTB, became "Aratar Anfinhir the Stormbringer," and began staging battles. The early weapons were crude, couch foam taped around broomsticks, but the idea was clear: a full-contact fantasy battle game, safe enough to play in a public park. He named it with an Elvish-sounding word, apparently Sindarin for "Battle Lord," and the founding chapter is still known as Dagorhir Aratari after his persona.

Growth came from television. In 1980 the local edition of PM Magazine spent a day at a Dagorhir battle, and interest in the D.C. area exploded; a national segment in 1983 inspired new groups, including the Realm of Middle-Earth in Illinois, and the game spread through the Midwest.

Why it mattered

Historians of live-action roleplay note that the form had no single origin: it appeared independently in North America, Europe and Australia among people who wanted to physically inhabit genre fiction. Within that story Dagorhir is the earliest recorded LARP group, predating both the International Fantasy Gaming Society (1981) and Britain's Treasure Trap (1982).

Its rules set the pattern for the American "battle game." Fighters use padded Boffer weapons (today open- and closed-cell foam over fiberglass or PVC cores) inspected before every fight for safety. Hits are counted by location rather than by Hit points: a blow to an arm or leg disables the limb, a blow to the torso kills. Heralds referee, but combat runs on an honor system. There is no magic, no character class and no level: a fighter's skill is the fighter's own. Members themselves often say the game is closer to a Miniatures & Board Wargames than to a roleplaying game, though costume is required and the setting is openly Tolkienesque. A typical field might pit Roman legionaries and Saxons against orcs and undead.

Wiese had conceived Dagorhir as something theatrical, "Outdoor Improvisational Dark Age Battle Games." As new players arrived with a more athletic bent, the Dagorhir Handbook formalized costume requirements to keep the fiction alive, a tension between sport and story that every LARP has faced since.

Legacy

Dagorhir spawned a family of imitators. Belegarth Medieval Combat Society split from it; in 1983 Jim Haren founded Amtgard in El Paso, Texas, borrowing rules from Dagorhir and adding the character classes and thrown "spell balls" that Dagorhir does without. Other groups such as Darkon joined the scene, and the American battle-game scene of foam weapons in public parks traces much of its DNA to Wiese's first fights.

Today Dagorhir is licensed to chapters across the United States and several other countries. Its largest gathering, Ragnarok, held since 2010 at Cooper's Lake Campground in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, averaged about 1,500 attendees between 2008 and 2014 (a record 1,627 came to Ragnarok XXIX in June 2014) and has since grown to around 2,000 for a week of camping and mass battles. Nearly half a century on, the game still delivers what its founder wanted from Tolkien and Robin Hood: the chance to pick up a sword and find out.