So I threatened to post didn’t I? Well, here it is, and it has nothing to do with Halloween. Well, sort of.
Recently I discovered something called Dagorhir while I was watching a show called Wreckreation Nation on the Discovery Channel. Dagorhir is a version of LARP – Live Action Role Playing – that combines elements of both history and fantasy. Dagorhir is both a sport and a game. Dagorhir’s participants experience their fantasies on a variety of levels. This wide ranging appeal is the reason for Dagorhir’s nationwide success.
Now I’d been looking into something like this for a while, but some of the other alternatives like SCA, The Society for Creative Anachronism which strictly deals with recreating the Middle Ages, or NERO, a LARP that also allowed fantasy characters, just seemed not really what I was after. Mainly that’s because I hate all the rules associated with the playing of the game. I’m basically not a gamer and have the attention span of a gnat so if it involves anything more complex than the instructions for making toast I tend to start daydreaming about butterflies or maybe severed heads (my therapist reserves comment on the last). That’s where Dagorhir comes in – very simple rules and no one cares if your character is a Roman Centurion or a monkey dude with a big foam mallet. Check out the photos to see what I mean.
Yes, it looks kinda geekish, but then again so does making corpses in one’s basement. Now I just have to somehow create another ten hours in every day so I can fit in a yet another hobby. Here’s some crappy videos (I didn’t want to get run over and bashed with foam swords so I didn’t get too close to the action) of the Gates of Fire III battle in Somerset, PA I went and watched on the last weekend in April, 2009.
