Chainmail (game)

Chainmail is a medieval miniatures wargame created by  Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax. The 1971 edition includes a fantasy supplement and is one of the oldest sets of rules for fantasy miniature wargaming, containing spells and monsters that would reappear in Dungeons and Dragons.

Early History
The use of 40 mm Elastolin miniatures for medieval wargaming was promoted by Siege of Bodenburg which appeared in Strategy & Tactics magazine in 1967. This motivated Jeff Perren to develop a few pages of his own rules for these miniatures. He introduced the rules to Gary Gygax and the LGTSA. Gygax expanded the rules to 16 pages and published them in the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society.

The Rules
In the core rules, each figure represents 20 men. Troops are divided into six basic types: light foot, heavy foot, armored foot, light horse, medium horse, and heavy horse. Melee is resolved by rolling six-sided dice: for example, when heavy horse is attacking light foot, the attacker is allowed to roll 4 dice per figure, with each 5 or 6 denoting a kill. On the other hand, when light foot is attacking heavy horse, the attacker is allowed only 1 die per 4 figures, with a 6 denoting a kill.

Additional rules govern missile and artillery fire, movement and terrain, charging, fatigue, morale, and the taking of prisoners.

The Fantasy Supplement
The rules first appeared under the name Chainmail when they were published by Guidon Games in 1971. For this edition of the game Gygax added rules for jousting, man-to-man melee, and conducting battles with fantasy creatures. The man-to-man melee used two six-sided dice (2d6) to determine whether a kill is made and took account of the attacker's weapon and the defender's armor. The armor sequence was almost identical to that which would later be used in Dungeons & Dragons.

The fantasy creatures and spells exploited the contemporary popularity of The Lord of the Rings and helped make Chainmail Guidon's best seller. In a 2001 interview Gygax recalled that

Each of the fantasy creatures are treated as one of the six basic troop types. For example, halflings are treated as light foot and elves are treated as heavy foot. Giants are treated as 12 heavy footmen, and require 12 cumulative hits to kill. Heroes are treated as 4 heavy footmen, and require 4 simultaneous hits to kill. Wizards were not limited to fireballs and lightning bolts: they could cast other spells. Unlike in D&D, a stronger wizard can cancel the spell of a weaker wizard by rolling a 7 or higher with two six-sided dice.

Use with Dungeons & Dragons
Dave Arneson used Chainmail in his Blackmoor campaign, and many elements of Chainmail were carried over wholesale into Dungeons & Dragons (1974). In fact, the original edition of D&D recommended the reader own a copy of Chainmail. Gygax intended the Chainmail combat rules to be used in D&D, though he provided an alternative d20 attack matrix which eventually became standard.

Early D&D players could fall back to the Chainmail rules when conducting battles between armies, a situation where the D&D rules would be cumbersome. Improvisation was required, since D&D contained monsters and spells not covered in Chainmail. In Swords & Spells (1976) Gygax tried to fix this problem by introducing a diceless approach for large battles which averaged each monster's D&D statistics. Swords & Spells was unpopular, and its rules were discarded in later editions of D&D.

Later Products
In 1975 TSR, Inc. acquired the rights to Chainmail and released the 3rd edition, which was printed as late as 1979. TSR then concentrated on role-playing games, leaving space for competition such as Warhammer by Games Workshop. In 1985, TSR released a successor to Chainmail called Battlesystem; it went through two editions.

A game based on the d20 System was available under the Chainmail name in 2002. It was replaced the following year by the Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures Game, which made the switch from metal figures to pre-painted plastics, following the trend of competitors such as Mage Knight.