Chainmail (game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Chainmail, the medieval miniature wargame created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, arrived in 1971 with a modest first print run and quickly sold one hundred copies per month. Few people who bought that slim rulebook could have guessed they were holding something that would reshape tabletop gaming for decades. What started as a four-page set of rules by a hobby-shop owner named Jeff Perren would grow into a layered system covering mass combat, jousting, man-to-man fighting, and a fantasy supplement populated by heroes, wizards, orcs, and dragons. How did a handful of wargamers in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, take a single obscure medieval game seen at a convention and turn it into a ruleset that would become the direct ancestor of Dungeons and Dragons?

• 2. From Bodenburg to Lake Geneva

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  In 1967, Henry Bodenstedt created Siege of Bodenburg, a medieval wargame built around 40mm miniatures. Gary Gygax encountered it at Gen Con I in 1968 and played it during the convention. The rules for Siege of Bodenburg had been published in Strategy and Tactics magazine, and Jeff Perren, a hobby-shop owner and fellow member of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, used them as the basis for his own medieval ruleset. Perren's original work came to just four pages. Gygax edited and expanded those pages, and the result appeared as "Geneva Medieval Miniatures" in the April 1970 issue of Panzerfaust magazine, using a 1:20 figure scale where each miniature stands in for twenty real soldiers. A revised version followed shortly after, published in issue number five of The Domesday Book, the newsletter of the Castle and Crusade Society, under the name "LGTSA Miniatures Rules" in July 1970, this time at a closer 1:10 scale. Later issues of The Domesday Book pushed the scale even further, introducing rules for man-to-man combat at 1:1 and a separate system for jousting.

• 3. Publishing the First Edition

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  Gary Gygax met Don Lowry at Gen Con III in 1970, and that meeting set the game on a path to print. Lowry was founding a company called Guidon Games and planned a series called "Wargaming with Miniatures". Gygax signed with him, and the first game Guidon released was the expanded medieval ruleset, now published under the name Chainmail. It appeared in March 1971 as Guidon Games' first miniature wargame and one of only three products the company launched at the outset. The cover art depicted a fighting crusader, inspired by a Jack Coggins illustration from his book The Fighting Man: An Illustrated History of the World's Greatest Fighting Forces. Perren and Gygax had each borrowed that Coggins image for their earlier articles in Panzerfaust and The Domesday Book, and Lowry did the same for the cover. For the fantasy supplement, Lowry drew the cover illustration himself, basing it heavily on a Pauline Baynes drawing created for J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham from 1949.

• 4. The Fantasy Supplement

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  Tucked inside the first edition was a 14-page section that would prove to be the most influential part of the book. The fantasy supplement introduced figure types that had no place in conventional medieval wargames: heroes, super-heroes, wizards, elves, orcs, dragons, and elementals. The system assigned each creature a role within familiar troop categories. Hobbits were treated as light foot, elves as heavy foot, and heroes counted as four heavy footmen, requiring four simultaneous hits to kill. Super-heroes were twice as powerful as heroes. At the heart of the supplement sat the Appendix E chart, which determined the die rolls needed for various fantastic creatures to defeat one another. Borrowing a concept from wargame designer Tony Bath, some figures could make saving throws to resist spells. A stronger wizard could cancel a weaker wizard's spell by rolling a seven or higher on two six-sided dice. The supplement also drew on the alignment philosophies of Poul Anderson, popularized through Michael Moorcock's Elric series, dividing creatures between Law and Chaos. The text openly referenced the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, and Michael Moorcock, and encouraged players to re-fight battles drawn from fantasy fiction.

• 5. Combat Mechanics in Detail

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  The mass-combat rules owed a direct debt to Tony Bath's medieval systems, operating at a 1:20 figure scale. Troops fell into six categories: light foot, heavy foot, armored foot, light horse, medium horse, and heavy horse. Melee outcomes came down to six-sided dice, with the odds shifting dramatically by matchup. When heavy horse attacked light foot, the attacker rolled four dice per figure, and any five or six counted as a kill. When light foot attacked heavy horse, the attacker got only one die for every four figures, and only a six registered as a kill. The system also covered missile fire, artillery, terrain, charging, fatigue, morale, and taking prisoners. The man-to-man combat rules, operating at a 1:1 figure scale, derived from a contribution to Domesday Book issue seven. Gygax lost the name of the person who wrote them, so those rules went to print without attribution. Their core was the Appendix B chart, which mapped weapon types against armor levels and listed the rolls needed to score a hit. Man-to-man melee used two six-sided dice to resolve each kill attempt. The jousting rules had a different origin: they traced back to Castle and Crusade Society rules published in Domesday Book issue six, reprinted in issue thirteen, and originally designed for play by post so that society members could compete in tournaments to raise their standing.

• 6. Chainmail and Dungeons and Dragons

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  In the June 1978 issue of The Dragon, Gary Gygax wrote that for the first two years of Dungeons and Dragons, players played primarily without any miniature figures at all. When visual aids were needed, players drew pictures or used dice and tokens as stand-ins. By 1976, the player community had developed a strong interest in using miniatures to represent individual characters. That same year, a rules supplement called Swords and Spells was added to Dungeons and Dragons to provide fantasy mass-combat rules at both 1:10 and 1:1 scale. Tim Kask, writing the foreword, described Swords and Spells as the "grandson" of Chainmail. Gygax's own introduction explained the gap: the Chainmail fantasy supplement had assumed man-to-man situations and provided nothing for large-scale fantasy battles, which was exactly what Swords and Spells was built to supply. The name Chainmail itself was revived in 2001 when Wizards of the Coast released the Chainmail Miniatures Game, a skirmish game tied directly to D&D and set in a previously unexplored corner of the World of Greyhawk called the Sundered Empire.

• 7. Later Editions and Legacy

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  Guidon Games published a second edition of Chainmail in 1972. A third edition followed after TSR acquired rights to part of the Guidon Games back catalog. Starting in 1975, TSR published Chainmail under its own name and kept it in print through eight different printings, the last appearing in 1985. The game that began as four handwritten pages by a hobby-shop owner had now passed through multiple publishers, scales, and ruleset expansions over more than a decade. Dungeons and Dragons itself contains a direct reference to the Chainmail jousting rules, pointing players to those mechanics for jousting matches, a thread connecting the two games that runs all the way back to the postal jousting tournaments in the pages of The Domesday Book.