Original Dungeons & Dragons With Chainmail, A One-Page Game & A Roadtrip
Sleepdrifter's Newsletter #15 📜 - What Is OD&D And Playing The Old Ways
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Summary
🎲 Original Dungeons & Dragons With Chainmail: What Is OD&D And Playing The Old Ways
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To: A One-Page Prehistoric Game & A Roadtrip
🎲 Original Dungeons & Dragons With Chainmail: What Is OD&D And Playing The Old Ways
I love history and most of all: game history. It used to be mainly about Retrogaming, so Video Game history, but for several months now I’m attracted to TTRPGs history.
It all started with Castle Grief and Chaoclypse posts about OD&D and retroclones like WhiteBox: FMAG and Delving Deeper. The whole vibe on their actual play was unmatched, with things you don’t come across when playing other OSR games.
It was all a matter of size, with OD&D you feel that wargaming is near and battle can take huge proportions.
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| Chainmail 2nd Edition Cover |
If you are not familiar with Dungeons & Dragons history and with what is OD&D as I was before, let me briefly explain it (I was very lost while starting the TTRPG hobby with all the AD&D, OD&D, B/X terms).
In 1971, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren released a wargame called Chainmail “Rules for medieval miniatures”. It contains everything you need for medieval battles: 1:20 ratio mass combat, man to man melee, jousting rules, siege rules, cannon etc etc.
More than that, it includes a Fantasy Supplement that simulates battles with Fantasy creatures (Trolls, Dragons, Orcs, Balrog, …). The Lord Of The Ring vibe is clear here, and I’m sure that huge Tolkienesque battles like Minas Tirith ones or Helm’s Deep had a massive impact on the creation of this supplement.
Meanwhile, a young guy named Dave Arneson worked on his own game called Blackmoor where players incarnate a character rather than a full war company. This was inspired by David Wesely’s Braunstein, one of the very first TTRPG-like attempts.
Arneson and Gygax meet and Gygax starts to write the rules Arneson got in his mind for Blackmoor while adding some other things to the game.
This was the start of something really big.
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| Dungeons & Dragons 1974 edition : book 1 - Men & Magic |
In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released the game they were working on: Dungeons & Dragons “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniatures Figures” (note the mention of “Wargames” on the subtitle, showing how the very first TTRPG was embedded in this genre).
The game was more focused on character creation, monsters, dungeon crawling and wilderness exploration than Chainmail, and of course: Role playing.
But it got a particularity: it was made to be played along Chainmail rules for combat and it used the map from another game: Outdoor Survival as a setting for exploration.
Later, supplements like Greyhawk, Blackmoor (partially based on Arneson previous work) and more were released and made D&D closer to what Gary Gygax created after: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). Chainmail and Outdoor Survival’s map were used less with those supplements.
AD&D was then shortened to D&D for the majority of folks, from newer players to mainstream media.
That’s why the original version of D&D was renamed OD&D (aka 0e or the 3 LBBs for Little Brown Books).
When you hear people say “I’m playing D&D” today, they probably are playing an AD&D game.
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| Editions of Dungeons & Dragons - Timeline @Wikipedia |
In 2006, I started to play TTRPG as a player with AD&D 3.5e (along with my friend Nvaet) for like 2 years before dropping this hobby for studies reasons, and because I was A LOT into making music.
I came back to TTRPG later, in 2022, mostly as a solo gamer then as a DM. In that period, I never played a D&D game but I loved OSR and I quickly heard about OD&D.
Back then, it seemed confusing and I very slowly went to read Retroclones (OD&D clones that try to be “easier” to play and understand). I had fun with Whitebox: FMAG and started to envision playing Delving Deeper.
But I got an idea in the back of my mind.
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| Killchain cover by Castle Grief |
In May 2024, Castle Grief released a “streamlined and fast version of 1971’s Chainmail” called Killchain.
Reading this gives me the same vibe as 2 video games I love: Mount & Blade and Battle Brothers. In both, you play as a character who starts to hire other people, gain fame and fight great battles. Mount & Blade is a more epic one, with huge battles and castle sieges and Battle Brothers is more a mercenary one (with a 15~20 characters party) in a gloomy setting.
So, I started to envision a Killchain hack called Land Of Merkwa. I noted some troop types, creatures to fight and stuff to do and I was planning on writing rules to be able to incarnate the leader as a unique character who starts alone and quickly hires other people to finally make huge battles.
As often, I never finished writing it, probably because I was working on other games at that time.
Now, more than one year later, I started to learn OD&D with Chainmail and everything was clear: I had to make Land Of Merkwa an OD&D+Chainmail setting as almost everything is already covered in that book.
Fun fact, as I’m writing those lines, Castle Grief released a Substack post on how he changes his next game Lordes’ home-made engine to OD&D+Chainmail (and, as usual with CG, it looks awesome!)
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But before working on such a project, I wanted to have fun while learning all of this. That’s why I choose to play them solo, starting with only Dungeon Crawling.
For that, I use Gary Gygax's very own solo Dungeon Crawler that was released in spring 1975 on The Strategic Review Volume 1. I spoke about it briefly a while ago, it was planned to be its own Substack post but I never took the time to write it…
These rules were meant to be played with OD&D so that’s perfect.
As I was creating my characters (2 fighters, the stats have spoken) and started to delve in the dungeons, I quickly got a ton of questions and misunderstood stuff. It got worse when I started to learn how to fight monsters with Chainmail rules.
I’m French, and all that “old” English words and imperial measure adds a lot to being lost.
So here is what I used to be more comfortable with all of those:
Solo Dungeon Crawler’s Youtube channel, who makes the very same stuff: dungeon crawling with OD&D and Gary Gygax solo rules along with Chainmail combats. He also tried to be more accurate on how this was played back then, reading all The Strategic Review different volumes, reading Gygax’s OD&D drafts and later clarification about the rules.
He also got blog posts about how to use Chainmail in OD&D that helped a lot. Go read it!Bandit Keep’s Youtube channel, who also play OD&D with Chainmail in a 2 years old campaign that keeps getting videos!
r/ODND subreddit, to got other points of view and ways of playing
The Old Lords Of Wonder And Ruins by AlchemicRaker: an amazing zine that compiles all the combat rules from OD&D and Chainmail in a more clear version. They are the very same rules but much easier to read and understand.
As mentioned before: Castle Grief and Chaoclypse Substack posts about playing OD&D
I still got a TON to learn from it. The harder part for me at the moment is to properly understand the way chainmail works as I’m really not used to wargames.
All of this makes me want to make videos of actual playing and learning those but I already have a ton of stuff to do (including making videos about game design that I planned, started to write but still not shot and edited…)
But don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying these games were better than modern games. They are just different in terms of rules and vibes.
Playing this way is really making my mind sparks with imagination and creativity. It really feels like retrogaming to me and all the inspiration it gives me. I don’t know why playing old video games and old TTRPGs makes me feel this way, maybe because these were games invented by few people, passionate about what they are doing instead of being just something pushed by money and greed.
It really feels like the modern indie TTRPG scene, where a lot of you are creating amazing and inspiring games/settings/one-shot/you-name-it.
🧙🏼♂️What I’m Up To: A One-Page Prehistoric Game & A Roadtrip
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| My new One-Page game: Weak, Lost & Alone |
As I have mentioned in my last newsletter post, I made a one-page game for the One-Page RPG Jam 2025 called Weak, Lost & Alone. It’s almost more of a board game-like than a TTRPG but it was fun to make and very different.
It’s a solo survival game where you are a lone Homo Sapiens, lost in a cold steppe and hunted by something.
Retrieve your tribe or die trying.
I made it in only one week before going on a roadtrip across the French Alps (see below) and I released it as soon as I returned.
You can read more about the way I’ve thought of the game in my previous post. I speak about the whole game design idea behind Less Is More and Push-Your-Luck.
If you read those newsletters for a while now, you know that I bought a converted van and that I planned to go to the French Alps during my holidays.
It’s now done and it was fun (and exhausting).
We drove about 3000 km (Approx. 1865 miles) during 3 weeks.
The first week we went to a rock festival in Brittany, where we actually met with my SO. Then we headed back home and then drove to the center of France, to visit volcanos (Puy De Dôme).
After that, we visited Chartreuse, Hautes-Alpes (with a beautiful view of La Meije), Savoie and Haute-Savoie (where the Mont-Blanc is).
We slept in 15 different beautiful spots, always with amazing views.
The first week was pretty cold, from 1°C to 9°C at night.
Then unbearable heat came. 36°C or more inside the van was too much, and our dog is a Finnish breed that doesn’t handle this much.
We had a blast though! We drove one of the very highest roads in Europe, that goes as far as 2800m of height (9 186 feet). The truck handled it like a charm.
We still got a lot of conversion to do inside the truck to feel more like home, but otherwise it was already pretty decent.
That’s it for this week!
Let me know if you enjoyed this article, if you played/read/watch any of the stuff I mentioned this week 😀
See you next Friday!
Cheers !
Sleepdrifter
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