Chainmail spent forty years languishing in the wilds. Everybody knew it was there, they all knew it was important, and they all kinda knew that it had something to do with the early days of D&D. But the Chainmail rules were hard to parse and the physical demands of painting minis and getting on the table was too a high a barrier for the analytical crowd to get over. Chainmail also doesn’t lend itself to understanding without play, and the analysts who proclaim themselves experts are way too busy theorizing to actually play the games they write about.
So it remained a mystery for a long, long time. Hell, the most referenced book on the subject calls The natural progression from wargame to the wargame subset known as RPGs an “elusive shift”. Oh, you can say that few guys fiddled about with it in quiet corners, and it never fully disappeared, but it remained a backwater artifact only seldom acknowledged and had no real cultural import.
Things began to change around 2021. It took some time, but these days people have a much greater appreciation for elegant it is, how easy it can be, and how much fun it can be in the right hands. They also understand better how to seamlessly integrate it with any version of D&D, and that has the guys who wanted Chainmail memory-holed shook.
There’s no question The Joy of Wargaming played a central node in this transformation. Maybe it wasn’t the only cause, but it’s certainly one of the places where several previously disconnected currents came together.
Granted, the timing was no accident. In December 2021, I released Chainmail: Assault on Skull Mountain, It wasn’t the first video to talk Chainmail (here was a brief history), it might not even be the first time somebody played it on the tubes, but it was the first time anyone walked through the learning process, and it was definitely the first time anyone treated it as a game that could be enjoyed – not as an artifact or historical curiosity – but as a delightful evening in its own right.
Two months later, I followed it up with Chainmail: Old School Cool, which explicitly presented the game as the first step in understanding primordial D&D and how the shift was natural rather than elusive.
The next phase demonstrated something even more provocative: Chainmail wasn’t merely useful for reenacting medieval battles. It could become the military engine of an ongoing fantasy world. I showed how easy it could be to run a Chainmail campaign by combining Chainmail battles with campaign management and world-building.
The old Chainmail discussion was largely genealogical and theoretical. I treated it as a living game.
No man is an island, and my interests were driven in part by Jeffro Johnson’s Trollopulous campaign, where events occurring at the domain level of an AD&D campaign needed a method of resolution. Jeffro’s own account is remarkably explicit about the significance he attached to this experiment. He described the combination of patron play, campaign management, and Chainmail as a gaming idea that had been “lost for over 40 years” and was only then being recovered. He also specifically credited myself and Mr. “Fluid the Druid” Renninger for making the battles happen:
WHY ARE YOU USING CHAINMAIL WITH AD&D? — Because the Monster Manual assumes you will. Did you see how many Chainmail armies are broken down in this pages?
As I delved deeper into Chainmail experience than anyone had before, he delved into Braunstein’s which proved to be a match made in heaven.
At this point the discoveries were less about Chainmail and more about what had been forgotten. The traditional story most modern players inherited is that D&D grew out of wargaming. Fine. Nobody objects to that. But “D&D grew out of wargaming” is a historical statement so broad that it doesn’t tell you much.
Discovering how much of the original D&D campaign was still supposed to operate as a wargame changed how to interpret everything from the monster statistics to mass combat to morale to the relationship between a high-level character and an army. That switches Chainmail from an interesting historical footnote into an interpretive key, and one too complicated for the theorists and flip-through artists to notice.
Getting the game on the table, and asking for crowd-sourced insights meant allowed for greater understanding such as that shown by Clerics Wear Ring Mail when he recognized that the Chainmail Campaign series demonstrated Chainmail worked as both a map-based campaign game and as a mass-combat component of an ongoing RPG.
Chainmail is not uniquely suitable to one-offs… The incorporation of Chainmail battles into an RP campaign…promotes domain play: it justifies the 30-300 or 40-400 no. appearing results that appear in some of the monster entries as handle-able by a planning party; and lastly, it allows the characters to graduate: to become something more than themselves – being heroic in their upper levels, but also retaining an element of mortality in that even Conan can be overcome with enough bodies piled upon him.
And then came the inevitable second-order effect.
If Chainmail works better with D&D than we thought, perhaps we have misunderstood some of the things D&D inherited from Chainmail.
By 2024, that question had become explicit. A seemingly innocent question led to renewed discussion of Chainmail’s distinction between turns and rounds and whether conventional AD&D combat had misunderstood rules inherited from its wargaming ancestry. Jeffro Johnson wrote about the resulting controversy directly: people were suddenly asking whether they had been playing AD&D combat incorrectly because they had misunderstood Chainmail in the first place.
In a healthy hobby filled with normal people this would be a cause for celebration.
Instead, what the D&D community got was RPG grognards reacting defensively. They aren’t crank about Chainmail itself, but rather about what Chainmailimplies about early D&D. OSR purists have built a cultural identity around being custodians of “true” old‑school play, grounded in textual archaeology and a belief that early D&D was coherent, doctrinal, and reconstructable. The discoveries surrounding Chainmail challenge that narrative by presenting a version of early‑D&D lineage that is more improvisational, messy, and wargame‑adjacent than OSR orthodoxy typically allows.
This creates a tension because it suggests that some self‑appointed experts may have missed or over‑systematized parts of the real history. They often proclaim “no one ever played that way,” leaning on vague forum recollections and selectively remembered anecdotes to dismiss the lived experience of people who have actually done the homework. What they cannot accept is that Chainmail’s approach implies early D&D wasn’t a single unified tradition but a bricolage of house rules, wargame habits, contradictions, and emergent playstyles. That threatens the interpretive authority they’ve spent years cultivating. The resulting crankiness is a defensive reaction to the possibility that their preferred theory of the hobby’s origins may be incomplete, and that they have been poor stewards of that history.
A healthier response would shift from defensiveness to curiosity. Instead of protecting a narrow narrative of early D&D, OSR fans could welcome Chainmail as another lens on a messy, improvisational origin. Embracing the idea that early play was inconsistent and experimental opens space for richer history rather than threatening expertise. It means acknowledging gaps, valuing multiple interpretations, and moving from gatekeeping toward stewardship. In short: treat Chainmail not as a challenge to authority but as an invitation to expand the story.
Of course, unlike true enthusiasts of the hobby, they have no interest in expanding the story if they can’t monetize it. And they have to react in a defensive crouch to any interpretation that threatens their marketing ploy of being the experts. Luckily, we still live in a world where outsiders like me and the bros have a voice and can continue to experiment and learn and teach those with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
At least for now.
Enjoy it while it lasts.