OD&D Evidence Chainmail Had Material from Dave Arneson

[zenopus]

I too would like to see the evidence of when Chainmail was first available. I imagine it is something from wargaming journals/magazine from the time and/or personal correspondence.

But I doubt a small publisher like Guidon would have released three games on the same date.

 

[pemerton]

I agree that there is no proof that Tractics was distributed on the day Lowry claimed it was (day 1 of Gen Con 4). However, Lowry claiming it on a copyright form represents some evidence that it was, and i think that it is also evidence that the other dates he gave were similar approximations of when the products went on sale, rather than arbitrary dates.

I don't see how both these things can be true.

If the date on the Tractics form is not proof, and at best some modest evidence as to the day of distrubition, then how can it also be evidence that other dates are "similar approximation"? You would need some independent evidence as to when Tractics was first distributed which then provides support for your conjecture about the copyright dating practices. Perhaps such evidence exists. Maybe it's even easily available. But you haven't presented it.

He may have remembered the day wrong for Chainmail, and his May 15 date could be an estimation. However, he did claim that date within just 7 months (his copyright form was notarized on Dec. 31, 1971). Therefore, while he may not have gotten the exact day right, he’d have to have been off by 2 months in his estimation to match the March date that many books claim.

Nothing here engages with the points made upthread by @lowkey13 about industry practice. It is conjecture. The way to find out when Chainmail was first distributed is to actually find direct evidence (eg testimony of people as to when they bought it; sales receipts; advertisements; etc). Trying to infer from a copyright date, without any further evidence as to that particular person/firm's copyright dating practices, and in the face of evidence of industry practice that suggests the date is not reliable, does not seem very sensible to me.

Now let’s look at the flip side: what is the evidence of the March 1971 date that everyone has chosen to use? I know of no statement by Arneson, Gygax, or Perren supporting that date. While it appears in many books, none that I have seen offer a citation or explanation from where that date came from. From researching this, as best as I have been able to tell, that March date stems from the 2006 forum post I referenced earlier, which itself offers no citation or explanation.

Have you asked people like Peterson? I'm sure they will be able to tell you how they arrived at that date.

Now given that context, would you agree that the evidence for Chainmail being published in May, though far from a certainty, is still stronger than the known evidence that Chainmail was published in March?

No. The two bits of evidence known to me are your conjecture based on a copyright date, and the date given by Peterson and others. Given what I know of your methodology, and Peterson's methodology, I would trust Peterson's date more. If you can actually tell me why Peterson's date is wrong and his methodology flawed, I'm happy to hear it. But you haven't. As far as I can tell you don't even know how Peterson arrived at that date. You're simply conjecturing that he took it from a website.

 

[zenopus]

I found one data point regarding the publication date of Chainmail. Over on the mostly defunct but still useful Tome of Treasures forum, poster scribe writes that the April 1971 issue of International Wargamer has a full-page advertisement for Guidon Games that includes Chainmail.

International Wargamer April 1971 listing at ToT

Scribe's Musings:

From Guidon Games advertisement bit on Chainmail....

"This Illustrated booklet brings you comprehensive rules for wargaming with your medieval miniatures (such as the Airfix "Sheriff of Nottingham" and "Robin Hood" sets). These rules have been thoroughly playtested by the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association. They are designed for the serious table-top wargamer and combine realism and detail with the playability in just the right mixture.

Special features include rules for jousting and hand-to-hand combat and a large Fantasy supplement for gaming with super-heroes, wizards, trolls, hobbits and (why not) dragons, among others."

Unfortunately there's no image of the ad, which could be useful because it might provide more info like price, ordering info, other games available etc. This magazine does not appear to be available digitally.

 

[Mistwell]

Have you asked people like Peterson? I'm sure they will be able to tell you how they arrived at that date.

Peterson is on Twitter, @docetist. I just Tweeted him the question, though folks should feel free to Tweet him with different wording if you think I got the wording on the question off.

 

[zenopus]

Another data point: Playing at the Word page 42 says that Domesday Book #9 has an "announcement of the publication of Chainmail" including mentioning a "large fantasy supplement for fighting Tolkien-type battles" (the second quote being directly from DB#9). Jon repeated this info on his blog in 2012 ("this issue contains the first notice of the publication of Chainmail in the Domesday Book")

The Acaeum page for the Domesday Book has issue #9 as "Date Unknown" (indicated here as "undated"), but the next issue (#10) is dated "April 1971", which would place issue #9 as earlier than April 1971. PatW page 634 says that issues #8-11 came out "roughly quarterly". The April 1971 date of #10 on the Acaeum seems to be taken from the date of the one of the articles ("Ancients Society Report, Last Issue, 4/30/71"), which since this is at the very end of April might mean this issue was actually published later.

Again, there's no scan available but Jon has pointed out on his blog that some issues of DB, including #9, are available to researchers at Bowling Green State University library.

 

[increment]

So, having been pointed to this thread a number of times now, let me start out by saying that the OP and I have a bit of history from another forum, and I am weighing in here with due dread of causing cross-forum drama. Sorry for that.

Dates for these early games are nearly always problematic. They were not like blockbuster movies that have a stark "release date" when suddenly you could find them everywhere. If you look at the way I dated the anniversary of D&D, it is all based on things like when the first ads appeared, when "coming soon" notices appeared, and from that really the best I could do was just to sketch boundaries around a period of time. It's hard to say a game was available if no one knows about it, which is why I like ads, especially for things that were effectively mail-order products. But they can also present a sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: advertisements need to be sent in to periodicals in advance, and given how amateurish the hobby was, it is hard to know when periodicals were actually published (as opposed to the month on the cover), whether people advertised things that were actually done, and thus how well advertisers timed the availability of their games versus their marketing.

My Chainmail date is really no better than any of my other dates for these things. I know I spilled quite a bit of ink in PatW on the date for Blackmoor's inception, and I could have done the same for Chainmail. A March date was already around in earlier looks at the history of the game, and what I saw was consistent with that. My date was, following Zenopus's lead above, based in no small part on the earliest advertisements for Guidon Games, which appeared in the April International Wargamer and a few other contemporary places. But that has to be understood in terms of how the IW production schedule operated at the time, and who got which issues when. The short story is that I concluded that the March and April IWs were produced and shipped simultaneously - so effectively, there was no issue shipped in March - and that IW production had a long lead-time, maybe up to six weeks between layout and issues being in people's hands. There are good data points to suggest that the March and April IWs were jointly in subscribers' hand by the third or so week of April. Note that the April IW ad lists Chainmail as available, but suggests that Alex and Dunkirk were scheduled for an April 30 release - something you would not bother to mention if you expected your mail-order ad to be seen like April 18th. But these are ultimately indirect data points, and to be absolutely clear, they don't rule out an April "release" date for Chainmail - if you're counting from when just anyone could have ordered it, it wouldn't be until after they saw an ad.

That was my reasoning ten years ago when I was writing that part of PatW, anyway. I have seen more data points since, but in order to avoid the drama mentioned above, I'll only remark that Dave Arneson was not "just anyone", and that he was surely aware of Chainmail before April. That much said, let me reiterate - dating for these things is really problematic, and arguing for an April "release" is not inherently an untenable position. The month of May, well, that would seem pretty unlikely.

Most else of what I'd say here has already been said.

 

[mwittig]

@increment, thank you for your post. I've been told you have Domesday Book #9, and that there is an ad in that issue "announcing" Chainmail. For the benefit of everyone here, could you please give us another data point and tell us the postmark date of your Domesday Book #9?

 

[increment]

For the benefit of everyone here, could you please give us another data point and tell us the postmark date of your Domesday Book #9?

I wish. My DB#9 does not have a postmark; some were mailed in separate envelopes. It seems pretty random which were and which weren't.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Here is the advert from DB #9. That issue was undated and thus has to be roughly ascertained by way of the issue preceding it (#8) or proceeding (#10) with the difficulty being the sporadic publishing that caused me to take over the editing starting issue #12. Otherwise, and very strange in fact, is that unlike earlier issues (1-4 for example) later issues of DB were not always folded or stapled and with an outside post mark and address which was even carried on with #12 and #13, but were mailed in envelopes, especially to ranking members, at least, in the 'Society (like Arneson's copies). Then there is the matter of local hand outs to Gary, myself and Terry Kuntz that have no dates. So. Unless the actual mailers were kept there is little chance, currently, of accurately dating when that advertisement by Lowry occurs, though other channels may present themselves as this is being worked on from my end as well.

 

[mwittig]

The April 1971 date of #10 on the Acaeum seems to be taken from the date of the one of the articles ("Ancients Society Report, Last Issue, 4/30/71"), which since this is at the very end of April might mean this issue was actually published later.

I think this is a great observation Zenopus.

Here is the advert from DB #9. That issue was undated and thus has to be roughly ascertained by way of the issue preceding it (#8) or proceeding (#10)

Rob, thanks for joining the discussion! I agree. I also think Zenopus is right that the April 1971 date given on the Acaeum website is likely earlier than it should be and ought to be corrected. @increment, to help Rob's, Zenopus's, and my research, could you please tell us the postmark date of your Domesday Book #10 (or any that you are aware of)?