By David W. Graham (AKA Seldon Stilicho Animus Lioninus)
Author of Battle Gaming: The New American Sport
©2012 David W. Graham

I drafted this material in 2007 as part of the history of battle gaming for my book “Battle Gaming: The New American Sport.”  I removed this topic from the book because it seemed to have too much detail about a political fight that most new players would not care about.  The finial history that I did publish in the book is more of a global overview of the entire sport.

In October of 2011, Richard Hicks created a facebook group called “Dagorhir and Belegarth reunification league.”  Richard who is a senior in high school had no idea what he is getting into when he created this group.  It is for him and all the other players who have come after 2002 that I have decided to post this article on the internet.

In 2001 the confederacy model for all of the Dagorhir clubs blew up.  There was a rift so deep that the organization split into two almost equal halves.  It is a story that involves weapons, money, egos, and lawyers.

The formation of Belegarth was forged in the culture differences of the chapters formed outside of Washington D.C. back in the early 1980’s.  It was then fueled by the rapid growth of Dagorhir and the lure of fame and fortune that might bring.

During the early 1980’s Dagorhir began to spread into the Midwest.  One of the new clubs formed outside of Cleveland Ohio in 1981 by Falcon, a former player from the Washington, D.C. area. A second was established by Jeff Hutton in Danville Illinois. Jeff had watched the nationally televised Dagorhir presentation of it on the national syndication of P.M. Magazine.  Jeff had written to Brian Wiese and received a copy of the Dagorhir handbook.

These two new groups shared the same game play as Dagorhir but not the same culture.  Brian had always enjoyed the dark ages, a time of tribal warfare with bands of warriors roaming the lands.  The original group in D.C. embodied that energy.  Both the new groups instead took a much more high medieval approach.  The Ohio group established itself as a Kingdom with a court.  The Illinois group established itself with a class of knights and a knight’s council to run the group.  This cultural difference would never be bridged and would be one of the seeds that would bring about a great conflict in 2001.

To understand the events leading up to the breakup of Dagorhir, I must set the stage.  In 1994 Gregg Larson a very long time member of the Middle Earth Dagorhir group started making weapons and selling them to friends. He is a research scientist and works on a variety of projects for the Department of Defense in a University setting.  No he is not one of those top secret scientists.  His specialty is road surfaces.

Gregg started applying his engineering knowledge to sword building. He also had a knack as an entrepreneur, sufficient capital, and a suitable property to start a real weapon making business. Thus was born Edhellen Armory. I know at that time he had quite a lot of debt.  Edhellen was not making money and would likely not make a profit for some time.  He is a big fan of battle gaming and saw it his mission in life to grow Dagorhir.  The best way he saw for doing that was to create easily obtainable sports equipment (weapons) for the new players.

At the same time, Dave Vierling, a very long time member of Dagorhir Aratari, had established the same goal. Dave Vierling had been talking with some toy manufactures about producing a line of in store Dagorhir branded weapons. I believe that Dave had the best of intensions for growth of the battle gaming sport. I believe he saw the proceeds funneled back into the organization to fuel marketing and growth. The only problem was that there was no global organization to license name Dagorhir.

Dagorhir was rapidly filling up with long time members of 20+ years of experience.  Many of these players started as teens and were now dropping into middle age.  They had families, homes, jobs, and responsibility.  They also had the most experience and were therefore running the various clubs around the country. Liability was becoming a big concern.

The Dagorhir game was showing strong growth. With the rules and handbook freely available on the Internet, new little “Dagorhir” groups were popping up all over the country.  The questions that were on everybody’s mind was: "If someone playing in Rawlings Wyoming, and they are using the Dagorhir name, are they following the safety guidelines? If not, and a person gets hurt, are we all going to get sued?"

At Ragnarok, June 4th and 11th, 2000 a council representing the confederation of Dagorhir clubs voted unanimously to approve a committee to research whether Dagorhir might acquire benefits by incorporating nationally. They were to bring back their results to the next council meeting at the 2001 Ragnarok Event in one year.

At this point the concept of an incorporated entity was in all the stake holders’ best interest.  At the time, Dave Vierling and Sean Richey were running the Dagorhir Battle Gaming Association, Inc. If the committee concluded that incorporation was in the best interest of Dagorhir, I can only assume that Dave and Sean expected their corporation to be the natural entity.

There had always been that culture difference between the Aratari and the Midwest groups.  It fostered a certain level of distrust.  I know it played into the events as they unfolded.

Things fell apart in February of 2001. It appeared that the committee was going to return with a recommendation to incorporate.  It also appeared that they were leaning towards using an existing corporation, Dagorhir Improvisational Battlegame, Inc of Ohio. This made sense, as it was the oldest Dagorhir corporation on record.

Dagorhir Improvisational Battlegame, Inc was the creation of Pentwyvern the second major group of Dagorhir (1981). They did not incorporate until 1990, but that was still five years before I had filed the Dagorhir Battle Game Association, Inc in Maryland.  It looked like this would become the Non-Profit for Dagorhir.

This came as a shock to Dave and Sean who seemed to have an agenda to sit atop the Dagorhir pyramid.  By this time the toy deal had not materialized, yet there was still the vision. They put forth the argument that it should be the Dagorhir Battle Game Association, Inc of Maryland that should be the parent group for all of Dagorhir.

Many of those outside the Aratari saw this as a power grab by the founding group.  For someone like Gregg Larson, who was on the committee, this was a threat to the entire process.  Dagorhir needed to be strong if Edhellen Armory was going to be strong. 

In order to mitigate the destabilizing influence of the Aratari and to court the support of all the other Dagorhir chapters, Gregg set out to write a charter that would create a strong parent entity for Dagorhir.  This entity would not be based in Maryland.  Dave and Sean felt they were shut out from this process.

To take control of the situation Dave Vierling set about a process to wrest control from the committee.  He hired The Law Office of Lawrence D. Adashek to file for a trademark on the Dagorhir name.  He ran into one problem though, Dagorhir Battle Game Association, Inc had fallen into forfeiture back in 1997 because they had failed to file the required corporate reporting to the state of Maryland. The corporation was my baby but by then I had left Maryland and now was an active Amtgard player in Colorado. He quickly fixed the problem in April.  In May a trademark application for the name Dagohir was filed on behalf of the non-profit.

During this time of my life I had been ignoring Dagohir.  My son was born in 1998 and my daughter just that January. I was spending more time with the family.

I got dragged into the entire controversy as I keep receiving email appeals from both sides of the conflict.  I decided to try to broker a peace agreement and I made several phone calls to Brian Wiese and Dave Vierling.

Brian was livid about the trademark of the Dagorhir name.  He felt that Dave had no right.  Yet he stood with Dave’s assertion that it was better the Aratari then some other group.

Dave basically told me it was too late for a compromise.  The flame wars had basically escalated to such a level that there was no turning back.

Dave then instigated a Chapter contract model almost identical to the one found in Amtgard.  This is the same model that contributed to High Fantasy Society breaking from Amtgard in 1990. As soon as he did this things really went out of control.  All of a sudden all the groups that had been Dagorhir for as many as 20 years needed to file a contract with the Dagorhir Battle Game Association, Inc. if they wished to continue to use the Dagorhir name. 

The flame wars on the Dagorhir online forum were burning away any hope to recruit and retain new members to the club.  To counter act that, Sean quickly clamped down the system with what one might say Roman efficiency.  Many logins were shut down and it was difficult to have any discussion about the topic.

To counter act the shutdown, Gregg lead a rebellion on the internet setting up www.dagorhir.info and www.dagorhirubb.com. The latter being a Forum with no restrictions.

Eventually Gregg was served with a Cease and Desist order from The Law Office of Lawrence D. Adashek telling him that he had until December 7, 2001 to shutdown all the sites and remove all Dagorhir material or he would face a lawsuit.  Gregg complied and launched a new organization known as Belegarth.

I still feel a bit guilty about the breakup and my contribution to it.  In 1994 when I created the Dagorhir Battle Game Association, I had the choice of making the non-profit a “membership” organization or a “non-member” organization.  I chose “non-member” because it seemed easer.    In its “non-member” configuration, new members to the Board of Directors are added by existing board members. 

Now if I had chosen to go with“member” things would have been different.  For the organization would have defined what is a member, as well as established and maintained a roster of members. The members would have had the right to select and remove people from the Board of Directors.  I can only speculate how this injection of democracy would have affected the 2001 conflict.

Today Dagorhir and Belegarth are separate organizations. They have two different political philosophies.  I expect them to continue as two separate entities with a lot of crossover players.