Development Story: the role of Chainmail in the game industry
Where did Dungeons & Dragons begin and why does a developer today need to know this history? It's because without this system there would be no games like Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights or the Baldur's Gate series. Many of these games were the inspiration for our project. So where did it all start?
In the magical state of Wisconsin, in the town of Lake Jeniva, lived Gary Gygax and Jeff Perrin. Like the “classic” nerds from the TV series, they were members of a society of board game enthusiasts. In 1967, Strategy & Tactics magazine printed the rules for Siege of Bodenburg, a board wargame that involved the use of 40mm plastic miniatures of medieval warriors. It was this game that prompted Jeff Perrin to create his own rules for these miniatures. He got Gary Gygax interested in this project, who added his own ideas to the rules: the guys tried them out in practice, and then the rules were printed in the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade board game society. The idea turned out to be very successful, becoming, in fact, the forerunner of D&D.
In the United States, miniatures games have been popular since the mid-20th century, but the rules were usually centered on Antiquity, the Napoleonic era, or one of the world wars. Many people thought that the Middle Ages were not suitable for games, and this opinion wanted to dispel Gary Gygax, who specifically wrote rules for battles in the era of knights. But he went further: it was by adding fantasy elements to the game that he changed wargames.
Geigax, being a thorough man, created a detailed scheme that outlined what dice results a warrior with a particular weapon would need to successfully attack an enemy wearing specific armor. This basic scheme, which relates attack, defense, and die roll results, has remained in D&D to this day, though over time, skills have replaced equipment. And it worked! The Siege of Bodenburg, the wargame that once inspired Chainmail, is still played today.
The idea is ready, the community has evaluated it, but what's next? After all, you need to show your creation to the general public. And the guys go to publishers who are ready to invest money in their idea - this campaign took almost 4 years! Only in 1971 the company Guidon Games published a game by Perrin and Gygax, called Chainmail. The game proved to be popular in the fan community, and became a major hit in sales for the publishing company, with about a hundred copies sold per month (a lot for those times). In 1975, the rights to Chainmail were bought by TSR, Inc., a company created by Gygax, who published the game, which went through several revisions, until 1979. But since the company's main product was role-playing games, Chainmail ceded its niche to other tabletop wargames, notably Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Battles.
In 1985, TSR released the wargame Battlesystem, which was the spiritual successor to Chainmail. In 2002, Wizards of the Coast, TSR's successor company, released a modern miniatures game called Chainmail, a year later the name was changed to Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game. All these long years Gary and David have been working on improving roleplaying systems and inventing new roleplaying games.
Sadly, Ernest Gary Gygax left us in 2009, after a long illness, quietly falling into eternal sleep in his home, surrounded by family and friends. The gaming community remembered him as the “father of RPGs”, who did a lot for the gaming industry and worked on RPGs to the last. His friend (and creator of Blackmoor - we'll talk about it in another post), David Arneson, sadly left us as well - he outlived Gary by only a month, passing away in April 2009 after heroically battling cancer for two years. To this day, the graves of D&D heroes are still marked with flowers and 12-sided dice left by fans.
It's almost impossible to leave a mark in history, but no one knows where Madame Luck will smile on a developer - that's why we, when creating With The Fire And Sword, focus on the developers of the past. Play and have fun!