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OD&D with CHAINMAIL 

Since this summer (of 2026) I'm working on making a "hack" of Original Dungeons and Dragon using CHAINMAIL to resolve combat. This is by no means anything new and original, many have attempted and succeeded at it before. I will write this mainly to sort my own thoughts on the matter. However, first something about my background in D&D.

My Background in D&D

I have played RPGS since the late 80s, first swedish RPGs such as Drakar och Demoner (first a variant of Runequest, these days Dragonbane in english), Sagan om Ringen - Rollspelet, MERP in swedish). I have played D&D since the early 90s, starting with AD&D 2nd edition with my childhood group. I joined another local group in 1998 using 1st edition, I distinctly remember trying to wrap my head around combat segments. 

When 3rd edition hit the year 2000, we embraced it, considering it superior to both 1st and 2nd edition in every way. Remember that was from a player perspective, I can imagine the DM wasn't too thrilled with the broken CR-system and power balance-fetish, but he says he just winged it - he had been a D&D DM for quite some time by then. I specifically recalled we were impressed with the core mechanic and the math and I don't remember we noticed any drastic change how the game was played otherwise. Remember though, that starting playing TTRPGs in the late 80s meant trad games, i.e. rail roaded narration heavy games that persists to this day and I don't recall playing 1st or 2nd editions any differently. Paralell with D&D, I played a number of European trad-games and was deeply into story-telling games such FATE. I managed to design no less than 3 games myself, one set in a fantastic version of the Swedish middle ages, one in European thirty year war and one horrible hippie story game which you can read about (if you read Swedish) in earlier posts on this blog. 

We played 3rd edition until 4th edition hit, which we sneezed at and like many others went to Paizo and I started to DM a homebrew version of City of the Spider Queen using the 600+ pages Pathfinder rules. This went on until my campaign ended with a TPK in the Underdark, just at the doorstep of victory. We started play testing D&D "Next" (5th edition) 2012-13. 

By that time our DM had tired of "modern games" and we started playing B2 with his childhood game of D&D Basic/Expert. Unfortunately I separated from ex wife 2013 and got a girlfriend, which made me lose interest in anything else for 3 years - she played various purple games though, so I played various drama och edge games such as Mouse Guard, Apocalypse World etc. When life stabilized again, I had met my present day wife and went back to the table and D&D (thank Gawd) where the group was knee deep in the Isle of Dread. 

This was the first time I experienced sandbox adventure gaming, although I didn't know it at the time. And we didn't appreciate it. I think a combination of the brutality of B/X and lack of experience with sandbox games made us just feel lost and like every move would get us killed. We didn't have any clear idea where to go or what do without getting killed and just froze. The campaign ended thus. 

For a few years we tried a few other games, and ended up playing the board game Frosthaven. This was mildly amusing until one of us said what everyone was thinking "Unless we start playing proper RPGs again I'm done". Unfortunately neither myself or our original DM were interested in DMing at the time so a fellow player stepped up and we started that 5th edition campaign that we had been planning to do when we were play testing "Next".

We have played this campaign now for a few years and have some experience of the finished 5e game. Firstly, it hasn't been quite as I remember it from play testing. The Next kit was sleek and fast, no feats, no multiclassing and no tricks and the finished product wasn't like that, even though we only play with the three core rulebooks. And while we've had tons of fun playing the campaign, the weaknesses of modern D&D has crept up on us the last two years. The main problem for me is that it's apparent we are participating in a preconceived story, written by someone else and I have often felt we're expected to make choices mainly to avoid ruining the module and the work the DM has put in. I have many other issues with 5th edition I won't go into here - it's not a 5th edition issues blog.

The OSR

My story of discovering the OSR is by no means unique, I've heard accounts very similar to my own many times by now. A couple of years back I started to become aware of it, I have forgotten exactly how. First I think I was smitten mostly with the simplicity, speed and the lost dungeon mini-game, which I don't recall I've ever played properly (except in a convention Tomb of Horror one-shot in D&D eleven years ago). I got my hands on the usual lookers of the OSR as it was 2024, Cairn, Knave, Mörk Borg and Shadowdark (I ran Shadowdark for my 5e group and they were very impressed and had no reservations about anything except possibly the slightly rigid torch timer -rules). Last year i found the Classic Adventure Gaming (CAG) podcast and it blew me away. I immediately set myself to read OD&D and AD&D and I was thoroughly surprised to find them so highly functional, quite the contrary to the view of "main stream" OSR. I also started to glimpse a different game to any D&D I had previously played, except for, in retrospect, those few sessions of the Isle of Dread. I saw for the first time the brilliance of procedural game play, of empty rooms, of time keeping, of aging, open ended play and other aspects of the Game of Old. "A lost art" was the term that the most described by my impression of these procedures (lost in the sense of how the majority have played - a seemingly substantial number of players never stopped playing this way and many have discovered this much, much earlier than I did). 

For a while I just consumed OSR blogs and social media while continuing to study old rulesets. Enamored with the idea of Adventure Gaming campaigns I tried refereeing the Swords & Wizardry, AD&D and OD&D rules in one-shots. Whenever I tried out any out any of them I found it hard not to massively tinker, so I settled for OD&D, since it seemed designed for that. EOTB of the CAD discord said something along the lines of "AD&D is a fully furnished house, ready to move in, OD&D requires is an empty house for those who want to do the furnishing themselves" (perhaps he was paraphrasing someone else, I can't recall).