The Old Lords, Chainmail, and OD&D
Wargames and TTRPGs
The Old Lords of Wonder and Ruin
I am proud to announce the release of The Old Lords of Wonder and Ruin, a retroclone of “Chainmail”, the wargame upon which OD&D is based. It is a massive reorganization and restating of the rules, with a focus on accuracy to the core rules, and making the fantasy portion of it immediately usable with Original D&D.
The question pressing in most readers minds must now be: who exactly is this for?
First, it is for those who wish to play OD&D the way it was originally written to be played: with Chainmail being used simultaneously with the more popular “Alternative Combat System.” While it is obvious that OD&D can be played without Chainmail (we see the evidence of that to this day), bringing Chainmail / The Old Lords to the table immediately reveals a much deeper and more heroic game that has gone unnoticed for over 50 years.
Second, it is for wargamers interested in playing Chainmail, who value a high degree of accuracy, but with a superior layout and organization. The core, non-fantasy portion of the game is the most faithful retroclone of Chainmail that is currently available.
You can find the PDF available on DriveThruRPG, freely available as “Pay What You Want.” Within the next month, a nice Print on Demand, saddle-bound Zine option will also be made available through Lulu.
You can also get a preview of The Old Lords from my appearance earlier this week on Rollin’ Bones with Ryan Howard:
I will be making more articles about The Old Lords specifically in the future, but to kick things off I wanted to post this essay (which is also included at the end of The Old Lords) which addresses questions people have when they’re coming from D&D and wondering what “wargames” bring to the table for them.
Wargames and TTRPGs
The rules included in this work reflect the specificity (or lack thereof) of the rules for fantastic medieval wargames from which this work derives. It is clear at once that the rules are, in a sense, “incomplete.” This was intentional, as the originally intended audience was one which was already familiar with wargaming, and would have already had their preferred rules with which to “fill in the gaps.”
This allowed for the creation of a concise product, which is unfortunately obtuse to outsiders of the hobby wargaming of old. Within these rules are simple and compelling ways of handling mass combat, which works easily in tandem with fantasy role playing games. But how can an outsider utilize these rules? And won't these old wargame rules drag down the heroic atmosphere of the role playing game it is used with?
Firstly, medieval fantasy TTRPG enthusiasts may be shocked to learn that they are likely already familiar with a fairly complex wargame already, that being the rules in their TTRPG, and the battles they play out on a physical or virtual grid. Initiative, movement, and various kinds of attacks and actions, these are a skirmish wargame already. What rules are not included in this work, can be derived from the TTRPG it is being used with.
Second, the modern TTRPG enthusiast may again be shocked to learn that the heroes of the oldest editions of their beloved fantasy TTRPG were actually even more heroic than their modern day incarnations. Though unapologetically lethal at the very lowest level, by the second and third levels, old school heroes are already surpassing the strength of their modern counterparts. With the strength of three men, a third level character may actually fight three average soldiers simultaneously and still be marginally favored by the odds!
But what of the low level mortality rate of heroes? A level one character may actually prefer to fight in the ranks on a battlefield, as Heroic characters are the last members to die in a unit of troops. This is not a special case introduced by myself, for the pity of the modern audience. No, this traces back to the original rules of this game. As troops are far more likely to lose morale and retreat than to be entirely slain, it is quite likely that heroic characters, player characters, will still live to fight again even after a loss on the battlefield.
It is easy to see how the heroic characters from this wargame became the Fighters found in TTRPGs. In fact, the original rules advised for the use of these wargame rules for all “land combat”, and the ubiquitous d20-based combat system was reserved for “heroic fantasy combat”, which is quite similar to the Man to Man combat described in this work, except the combat is with fantastic creatures instead. In this heroic combat with a fantastic creature, combat advances in 1 minute increments, where each combatant is generally making a single attack against the other per round, again comparable to how a Man to Man duel would play out.
Monsters received a rule in Book II of the 3LBB, where they can make as many attacks against “normal men” as they have hit dice. This behavior exactly matches the rules for Fighting Men that we’ve already discussed: against common soldiers, the monster can make a great many attacks, but against a heroic opponent they will make only a single attack.
