Pre-Chainmail Era?

[dchapman]

Hi folks. Great forum!

What was around prior to Chainmail for wargaming/fantasy gaming? Anything published? If not published, anyone have scraps or copies of rules used by anyone prior to Chainmail?

~David

[piper]

The Braunstein Game.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wesely

[aldarron]

Hey David, Welcome to the Forum!

Fantasy Gaming: basically nothing as far as I know. I think Chainmail was the first fantasy creature/magic combat system published. Which is not the same thing as saying people weren't doing it. Dave Arneson apparently was dabbling in fantasy combat with his blackmoor game and no doubt there were others making up stuff.

Wargames: well, geese there's a whole history of that going back to chess, go, and ludus latrunculi. But if you mean in terms of using miniatures for medieval warfare, there was a set of medieval rules from a wargames club in Britain that some American groups were apparently using but in general medieval rules were very hard to find at that time. Most wargamers were doing Napoleonics.

[Finarvyn]

A guy named Tony Bath ran a Hyboria campaign in the 1960's. Not "fantasy" per se, but certainly swords & sorcery.

As far as wargames go, the "modern era" began with Avalon Hill around 1960, I believe.

[thegreyelf]

Now THAT I would love to get a look at.

The text of the rules he used, I mean, and the full text of the items shown on that site.

[jacar]

Tony Bath published his first edition of rules in Don Featherstone's book War Games.
www.johncurryevents.co.uk/books/featherstonewargames/homepage.htm

The second set is called Peltast and Pila and is reprinted and includes a lot of notes on running a war game campaign and a lot of information on the Hyboria Campaign in general.
www.johncurryevents.co.uk/books/bath/homepage.htm

I own both and they are both great reads. The Featherstone book contains several sets of 60s era wargame rules by various writers while the Both book deal specifically with Peltast and Pila.

John

[dchapman]

Thanks for the info and links gents.

piper

Great link, it gave me a launch point to some other sites, and came across these snips found here:
theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=73010

To get to the beginning of D&D you have to go all the way back to 1913 and HG Wells <link>. Wells was a pacifist and one of the first (and, arguably one of the greatest) science fiction authors of all time. He also loved to play with toy soldiers. So much so, that he actually developed a set of rules for playing with them. These "Little Wars <link>" as they were called, became quite popular. Wells' pastime got picked up by a number of different folks and spread around the world and thus the hobby of wargaming with miniatures, as a fun pastime, was born.

After a weekend of too many monster movies and nonstop Conan novels, Dave decided to chuck his stuffy Napoleonic campaign and create a medieval fantasy-flavored Brownstein, called, Blackmoor. For the players, Blackmoor was a real trip. Instead of making up characters, Dave had each of the players enter the world as themselves! But Blackmoor was a dangerous place, (ask one of them to tell you about the vampire rosebush) and the players were getting worried about getting their alter egos killed, so they quickly retired those characters and created new ones that they weren't afraid to lose.

The whole article is a great read.

[thorswulf]

I have Bath's "How to set up a Wargames Campaign" book. I'm not sure if it came out before OD&D, but it probably influenced the whole idea of using hex maps for campaigns to some degree if Avalon Hill board games didn't beat them to that. Jack Scruby's Mafrica map is also progenitor in many ways.