This is a companion blog post to Episode 55 of the Dungeon Masters Handbook, which talks how Chainmail expects you to adapt it for the game you want to run.
This post goes into details that seem more appropriate for written word rather than talking through them in the podcast. It’ll also have links to the source materials that I’ve referred to over the years.
Ever since rediscovering AD&D/Holmes, and then OD&D in 2009, I’ve wanted to have a game where I could easily run a mass combat of dozens or hundreds of opponents and have the PCs involved – whether leading the troops, or surviving a bloody combat, or however the PCs had stumbled into the fray.
That search started with Chainmail, took me through adopting Dan Collin/Delta’s Book of War, becoming involved with Ral Partha Legacy’s Chaos Wars, playing HOTT (Hordes of the Things), grafting magic and fantasy on top of Neil Thomas’s One Hour Wargames and now, in that big circle, back to Chainmail.
Along the way, I found two main resources for helping me to meld Chainmail into my OD&D:
Compleat Chainmail – a discussion document/rules set of how to use Chainmail combat within an OD&D game. This was my main source of inspiration for modifying Chainmail for use within OD&D.
Grognard – a “retroclone” of Chainmail, organizing the rules into a more coherent and modern layout. Effective for deciphering what a phrase or rule might be.
Since then, I’ve discovered a fantastic podcast of someone who’s also actively using Chainmail in their OD&D. That would be Daniel Norton of the Bandit’s Keep podcast/YouTube channel. I believe there are more podcasters also playing Chainmail in their OD&D games, but I’m not as familiar with them as I am with Daniel’s content.
So if you’re starting out on a similar journey, there’s a lot of material available for you to mine from!
My method for using Chainmail in OD&D has been to use the mass combat tables/approach for one-vs-one, one-vs-many, many-vs-many. I experimented with a simple table based on Book of War’s “At Hit” values and the foot types. It looked something like this:
The basic mechanic is to throw one die per “Fighting capability” (FC aka HD) of the attacker. If the attacker is a “unit”, then it’s one die per HD/FC x number of troops in the unit.
The target “to hit” is based on the armor class of the defender. (the middle table). For ease, I grouped them into defending types (LF, HF, AF). So if the defender is wearing chain, you need a 5+ to hit.
The rightmost table is what bonuses the attacker might get, based on their type and what AC they’re attacking. For this determination, I use the approach from “Compleat Chainmail” to rate attackers.
So let’s say Aeli is a skilled fighter, wearing chain and armed with a longsword. I’ll rate her as HF attacking. Anyone attacking her needs a 5+ to hit. She’s level 5, so she will get to throw 5 dice when she attacks. She can take 5 hits. If she’s knocked to 0, she has to make a Saving Throw vs. Death to merely be injured/unconscious instead of dead-dead.
Now this worked very well for all the types of combat. It went fast and furious and allowed me to have quite a mix of combats.
“But Chgowiz… how is this Chainmail? Where is the type vs type with all the crazy dice combos (such as light foot needing six hits to score one hit on heavy horse)? Where’s the man-to-man and fantasy combat?!”
Well, you’re right, but as I mentioned before, this was my first stab at using Chainmail. I wanted to have something simple for the game with my wife. I enjoyed it well enough that I continue to use it for that campaign.
Also, at least for my wife’s game, I was less interested in the crunch as much as I was in the outcome. The focus of our duet game is much more narrative than the fiddly bits, which is why the abstract nature of this approach works very well.
So… having developed this first iteration of an adapted Chainmail, we get to my Rescue of Hommlet game. I wanted to run an OD&D/Chainmail battle at the infamous Moathouse from the module T1 – Village of Hommlet.
The inspiration for this was Paul Stormberg’s “Battle of Moathouse” that he ran first in 2006 for Gary Gygax and other TSR notables, and has continued to run at GaryCons since. I really enjoyed the game.
So I began my modeling/rules project and you can read all about that here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The game, as it currently stands, is more about Chainmail with some OD&D tacked on to handle magic and other situations where the RPG provides a framework to resolve things.
As compared to how I run combat in my wife’s OD&D game, I ended up far closer to Chainmail mass-combat as originally written.
Missile fire – So when I went to write this small paragraph and re-read the rules, something dawned on me. I’d had this figured out wrong!
