Publisher: Wizards of the Coast and quot;Get the fantasy miniatures game that started it all!
Chainmail is a fully fleshed out fantasy miniatures game that puts YOU in charge of your very own army. Whether you want to fight historical battles based in the trenches of reality or fantasy battles rife with magic and fantastic beasts, Chainmail gives you the rules to fight the wars you want to fight!
The Chainmail Medieval Miniatures section features rules for terrain, movement, formations, fatigue, and more. The Fantasy Supplement provides information for Dwarves, Goblins, Elves, magic, fantastic monsters, and other rules necessary for combat in a magical setting.
Note: This is a classic product, and not for use with the D and amp;D Chainmail Miniatures skirmish game released October, 2001. and quot;
Product History
and quot;Chainmail and quot; (1971), by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, is the medieval miniatures system that was the progenitor of D and amp;D. It was published in March 1971.
About the Cover. Jon Peterson has traced the origins of the illustration on the cover of and quot;Chainmail and quot; (1971), which was penned by Don Lowry: it's a swipe of an interior picture from Jack Coggins' The Fighting Man (1966), an illustrated history of fighting forces. Gary Gygax drew his own version, which appeared in Domesday Book #5 (July 1970) and was marked and quot;After Coggins and quot;, but that credit doesn't appear on Lowry's and quot;Chainmail and quot; cover.
Origins (I): A LGTSA of His Own. Gary Gygax's strong interest in wargaming began in 1967, when he helped to reform the International Federation of Wargamers (IFW). This wargaming organization was at the center of a vibrant fandom that communicated through numerous fanzines.
However the story of and quot;Chainmail and quot; truly begins when Gygax became intrigued by medieval miniatures wargames at Gen Con I (1968), thanks to a demo of Henry Bodenstedt and rsquo;s and ldquo;Siege of Bodenberg and rdquo; (1967). He formed the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) in 1969 to support his new miniatures wargaming interest, where he was joined by Donald Kaye, Jeff Perren, Rob Kuntz, and others. It would in turn become the core of the Castle and amp; Crusade Society, a medieval special interest group in the larger IFW.
Origins (II): The Perren Conventions. LGTSA member Jeff Perren had been involved with the wargaming scene even longer than Gygax and had an extensive collection of ancient and medieval miniatures and mdash; and nbsp;including some of the Elastolin 40mm miniatures preferred for use in and ldquo;Siege of Bodenberg and rdquo; (1967)! He was probably the biggest proponent of the middle ages among the LGTSA players, which led him to write a few pages of rules for medieval miniatures wargaming. Gygax developed Perren's rules and published the and quot;Geneva Medieval Miniatures and quot; in the Panzerfaust fanzine (April 1970), before expanding them for the Castle and amp; Crusade Society's Domesday Book #5 (July 1970).
Origins (III): The Lowry Hobbies. Enter Don Lowry, another IFWer and owner of the mail-order store Lowrys Hobbies. Lowry's mail-order store mainly focused on selling miniatures; in order to improve the sales of those miniatures, he decided to start selling miniatures rules as well. He began with his own semi-professional variant of The Battle of the Bulge (1965) called and quot;Operation: Greif and quot; (1970) and followed that up by distributing the LGTSA's own Fast Rules (1970) for tanks.
Origins (IV): The Guiding Games. For Perren and Gygax's medieval miniatures rules to become and quot;Chainmail and quot; required a big change in Gary Gygax's life. In October 1970, he lost his job at the Fireman's Fund Insurance. Meanwhile, he'd met Lowry just a few months earlier at Gen Con III (1970). Put these factors together, and soon Gygax had become the editor of a new line of and quot;Wargaming with Miniatures and quot; games for Don Lowry's new gaming imprint, Guidon Games.
The line led off with a further expansion of the LGTSA Medieval Miniatures rules: a rulebook called and quot;Chainmail and quot; (1971). One of those expansions was a 14-page and quot;fantasy supplement and quot;, which would prove pivotal to the future D and amp;D game. That fantasy supplement may also explain why Gygax's first collaborator, Jeff Perren, didn't continue on. Gygax says that Perren was and quot;not captivated by giants hurling boulders and dragons breathing fire and lightning bolts, [nor] did wizards with spells, heroes and superheroes with magic armor and swords prove compelling and quot;. So, Perren would not be part of the roleplaying games to come.
(Much of this early history of and quot;Chainmail and quot; is draw from Playing at the World, by Jon Peterson, a superb look at the industry's wargaming roots.)
Origins (V): Many Printings. Guidon published a second, more professional run of and quot;Chainmail and quot; (1972) around the same time it relocated to Maine. Unfortunately, this relocation caused Gygax's departure as editor and may have been a factor in the slow-down and eventual end of the Guidon Games line. By 1974, Gary Gygax was interested in reclaiming and quot;Chainmail and quot; because of its relation to D and amp;D. He did so and a third edition (1975) would be published by TSR. It would stay in print throughout the '70s and into the '80s as D and amp;D's precursor and mdash; and nbsp;and a crucial component of the OD and amp;D (1975) rules.
Foreshadowing the D and amp;D Rules: The Basics. The first twenty-some pages of and quot;Chainmail and quot; are what you would have expected to see in the amateur wargaming miniatures community of the '60s. They're and quot;rules for medieval miniatures and quot;. Miniatures move and fight using a ratio of either 1:20 (one miniature representing 20 troops) or 1:10 (one miniature representing 10 troops), depending on the scale of the miniatures used. There are rules for melee, missiles, catapults, gunpowder, morale, and more. Some of the more advanced rules systems cover weather and sieges.
Foreshadowing the D and amp;D Rules: Man to Man. The first of the innovations of and quot;Chainmail and quot; comes in its second major section, which covers and quot;man-to-man combat and quot;. Here, and quot;a single figure represents a single man and quot;. It was intended for use for and quot;small battles and castle sieges and quot; as well of jousting. This change from miniatures representing units to miniatures representing singular persons was the most important innovation for supporting roleplaying games rather than wargames.
Foreshadowing the D and amp;D Rules: The Fantasy. However, D and amp;D is really foreshadowed in the third major section of and quot;Chainmail and quot;, the and quot;fantasy supplement and quot;, which is meant to allow players to and quot;refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers and quot; (or to create their own battles).
Many proto-D and amp;D ideas show up in this fantasy supplement:
- Races like dwarves, elves, and hobbits (halflings).
- Proto-fighters: heroes and their betters, super-heroes.
- Proto-magic-users: wizards, including seers, magicians, warlocks, and sorcerers.
- Different levels for their different sorts of characters, which Gygax says was the basis for D and amp;D's character advancement.
Spells like cloudkill, fire ball, haste, lightning bolt, phantasmal force, and polymorph.
Monsters like basilisks, dragons, ents (treants), trolls, wights, and wraiths. - A division of monsters into the categories of law, neutral, and chaos.
Future History. and quot;Chainmail and quot; would be crucial to the development of D and amp;D, even acting as the default combat system for OD and amp;D (1975). It would later be replaced by a new man-to-man combat system in and quot;Supplement I: Greyhawk and quot; (1975) and a new mass-combat system in and quot;Swords and amp; Spells and quot; (1976).
Many years later, Wizards of the Coast would reuse the name for their Chainmail Miniatures Game (2001), a d20-based skirmish combat system.
About the Creators. Gygax would, of course, go on to co-create D and amp;D. Together he and Perren would also coauthor Cavaliers and Roundheads (1973), which would be the first product from a small new company called Tactical Studies Rules (TSR).
About the Product Historian
The history of this product was researched and written by Shannon Appelcline, the editor-in-chief of RPGnet and the author of and nbsp;Designers and amp; Dragons and nbsp;- a history of the roleplaying industry told one company at a time. Please feel free to mail corrections, comments, and additions to shannon.appelcline@gmail.com.