Chainmail to Dungeons: The Wargaming Roots of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game
Long before anyone rolled a twenty-sided die to slay a dragon, hobbyists were pushing lead soldiers across sand tables in basements and recreation halls, arguing over line-of-sight rules and the precise effective range of a Napoleonic musket volley. The history of Dungeons & Dragons doesn't begin in 1974 with those famous three brown booklets — it begins decades earlier, in the genteel tradition of miniature wargaming, where grown men (and they were almost exclusively men) recreated historical battles with obsessive attention to detail. The path from those sand tables to the fantasy roleplaying game is winding, eccentric, and fascinating, and it runs directly through a 1971 rulebook called Chainmail.
The Deep Roots of Wargaming
The hobby of miniature wargaming has origins that stretch back to the Prussian military's Kriegsspiel of the early 19th century — literally "war game," a training tool used by army officers to simulate battlefield tactics using wooden blocks and detailed maps. But the civilian hobby owes its modern form largely to a single unlikely figure: H.G. Wells, the science fiction novelist, who published Little Wars in 1913. Wells's book described a game played with toy soldiers and a spring-loaded cannon that actually fired, complete with rules for movement, combat, and terrain. It was playful, accessible, and — crucially — it made wargaming a leisure activity rather than a professional exercise.
After World War II, the hobby grew steadily in both Britain and the United States. In the UK, figures like Tony Bath, Donald Featherstone, and Charles Grant developed increasingly sophisticated rules for recreating ancient and medieval battles. Featherstone's War Games (1962) became a foundational text, and his magazine Wargamer's Newsletter built a transatlantic community of enthusiasts. In the United States, the hobby coalesced around Avalon Hill, the Baltimore-based publisher whose board game Gettysburg (1958) and subsequent titles like Tactics II and D-Day brought wargaming to a wider audience.
It was through Avalon Hill's Gettysburg that both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson first encountered wargaming — independently, in different states, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The game sparked a passion in both men that would eventually converge in the creation of something entirely new.
The Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association
By the mid-1960s, Gygax had become one of the most active wargamers in the Midwest. He helped found the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA), a club that met regularly to play miniature wargames in members' homes and basements. Gygax was also a co-founder of the International Federation of Wargaming (IFW), which connected hobbyists across the country through newsletters and amateur publications — the "fanzines" of the wargaming world.
The LGTSA was a fertile environment for experimentation. Members weren't content to simply replay Gettysburg or Waterloo; they tinkered with rules, invented new scenarios, and pushed the hobby's boundaries. One member, Jeff Perren, had developed a simple set of rules for medieval miniature combat. Gygax, characteristically, took Perren's framework and expanded it dramatically, adding layers of complexity and detail. The result was Chainmail, published by Guidon Games in 1971.
Chainmail: The Bridge Game
Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures was, on its surface, a conventional wargame. It provided rules for massing medieval armies — infantry, cavalry, archers — and resolving battles between them on a tabletop. Units had movement rates, morale values, and combat factors. It sold well by hobby standards, moving about 100 copies per month through Guidon Games, making it the publisher's biggest hit.
But Chainmail contained something unprecedented: a 14-page fantasy supplement. This appendix introduced rules for heroes, superheroes, and wizards — individual figures of extraordinary power who could turn the tide of a battle. It included creatures drawn from mythology and fantasy literature: dragons, giants, trolls, orcs, elves, and dwarves. It even included rules for casting fireballs and lightning bolts — the first time combat magic had appeared in a commercially published wargame.
The fantasy supplement was correctly regarded as the first commercially available fantasy wargame system. It introduced or codified several mechanics that would become foundational to D&D: armor class as a measure of defensive capability, saving throws as a chance to resist magical effects, and the idea that a single heroic figure might operate independently on a battlefield dominated by massed units. Perhaps most importantly, it included a "man-to-man" combat system — rules for resolving fights between individual combatants rather than formations — which represented a conceptual leap from armies to characters.
Gygax's influences were transparent. The fantasy supplement drew heavily from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which had experienced a massive surge in American popularity during the 1960s paperback editions. Hobbits appeared alongside heroes and ents alongside dragons. (Later editions of Chainmail, and eventually D&D itself, would be forced to rename these creatures — "halflings" replacing "hobbits" — after the Tolkien estate objected.)
But Chainmail remained fundamentally a wargame. Players controlled forces, not characters. There was no concept of leveling up, gaining experience, or developing a persistent identity over multiple sessions. The leap from Chainmail to Dungeons & Dragons required one more crucial ingredient — and that ingredient came from Minnesota.
The Braunstein Innovation
While Gygax was developing Chainmail in Wisconsin, a parallel revolution was taking shape in the Twin Cities gaming scene around the University of Minnesota. David Wesely, a member of the local gaming group, had been experimenting with an unusual variant of miniature wargaming he called "Braunstein," named after a fictional German town that served as the scenario's setting.
The key innovation of Braunstein was perspective. Instead of each player commanding an army, each player controlled a single character — a town mayor, a military commander, a university chancellor — with individual goals and motivations. Wesely served as a referee, adjudicating the characters' actions and determining outcomes based on the situation rather than rigid tables. The game was part wargame, part improvisational theater, and it was a hit with the Twin Cities group.
When Wesely left for Army Reserve service in late 1970, Dave Arneson took the Braunstein concept and transplanted it into a fantasy setting. Using Chainmail as his combat resolution system, Arneson created the Blackmoor campaign — a persistent fantasy world where players controlled individual characters who explored dungeons, fought monsters, accumulated treasure, and grew more powerful over time. The first session was held on April 17, 1971, at Arneson's home.
Arneson's innovations were staggering in their implications. He introduced experience points, allowing characters to improve through play. He created character classes, giving different types of heroes distinct capabilities. He developed the concept of hit points as a measure of a character's ability to absorb damage. And he established the role of the Dungeon Master — a referee who controlled the game world, played its monsters and non-player characters, and served as both storyteller and judge.
From Wargame to Roleplaying Game
When Arneson demonstrated Blackmoor to Gygax at Gen Con in the fall of 1972, the effect was immediate. Gygax recognized that Arneson had found the missing piece — the element that transformed the Chainmail fantasy supplement from an interesting variant into the foundation for an entirely new form of gaming. Within months, Gygax had begun designing Castle Greyhawk, his own multi-level dungeon, and the two men began collaborating on what they initially called "The Fantasy Game."
The transition from wargame to roleplaying game wasn't a single leap but a series of incremental steps, each building on what came before. Chainmail provided the combat mechanics, the fantasy creatures, and the idea of individual heroes on the battlefield. Braunstein provided the concept of playing a single character with personal goals. Arneson's Blackmoor provided character progression, dungeon exploration, and the Dungeon Master role. Gygax's contribution was synthesizing all of these elements into a coherent, reproducible system — one that could be written down, published, and played by people who had never met any of the original designers.
The resulting game, published as Dungeons & Dragons in January 1974, retained clear wargaming DNA. The earliest sessions often used miniature figures on gridded maps. Combat was resolved using modified Chainmail tables (or the alternative system included in the booklets). Movement was measured in inches — a miniature wargaming convention — rather than feet. The Dungeon Master was called a "referee," wargaming terminology.
But something fundamental had changed. The game was no longer about winning a battle; it was about inhabiting a character, making choices, and experiencing a story that emerged from the interaction between players and the Dungeon Master's world. The wargaming framework was still there, but it had been repurposed to serve something radically different — and in the process, an entirely new form of entertainment had been born.
The Legacy in Every D20 Roll
Understanding D&D's wargaming roots illuminates aspects of the game that might otherwise seem arbitrary. Why does armor class exist? Because Chainmail needed a way to differentiate between a knight in plate mail and an unarmored peasant. Why do characters have six ability scores rolled on three six-sided dice? Because wargamers already had buckets of d6es, and the bell curve they produced felt intuitively right. Why is combat so central to the game's mechanics, even when players might prefer diplomacy or exploration? Because the engine under the hood was built to simulate fights.
Every Dungeon Master who has ever sketched a dungeon map on graph paper, rolled initiative for a party of goblins, or described the arc of a magic missile streaking across a darkened chamber is participating in a tradition that stretches back through Chainmail and Braunstein to Featherstone's sand tables and Wells's little wars. The wargaming roots of D&D aren't just historical trivia — they're the bedrock on which the world's greatest roleplaying game was built, and their influence is felt at every table, in every session, in every roll of the die.
For more on how these roots blossomed into the game itself, see The Birth of Dungeons & Dragons.