TTRPG Roots in the Game Battleship

Summary

Before any daring cartographer mapped underground dungeons in pursuit of fantastic adventure, Chainmail described a system for subterranean tunnels on paper. It needed these rules to simulate the discipline of the mines, a siege operation that involved tunneling under castle walls in order to, well, undermine them, destabilizing the walls to the point of collapse, after which invading troops could surge through the breach and storm the castle. These rules were a fairly late addition to the medieval system practiced in Lake Geneva, and they likely owe a debt to an earlier system blurb that Jack Scruby appended to Newell Chamberlin's rules in a 1965 issue of Table Top Talk. Any set of medieval rules worth their salt had some system for laying siege to fortresses. A siege system can be found on the last page of the LGTSA Medieval Miniatures rules in their 1970 Panzerfaust incarnation. But all of the action in those sieges stays above ground, involving catapults, ladders, mantlets, and the like. Chainmail incorporated those rules, which measured quantified points of damage dealt by siege weapons against fortifications, with some small modifications and expansions: Domesday Book #5 adds only a tease that mines "are only possible when conducting campaigns." But Chainmail went on to incorporate this system for mines, countermines, and breaches to those LGTSA rules. That this system appears as a kind of modular chunk at the end of the section, something tacked on, reminds us of how Scruby appended to the end of Chamberlin's medieval system his own rules on those three subjects, divided into two similar sections. Crucially, Scruby expected that opposing players would secretly record their mining efforts on paper and reveal the results to one another to determine the success of countermines, a clear antecedent to the system shown in Chainmail. Chainmail, however, requires the use of a neutral third party, a judge, who would monitor the secret progress of both teams of tunnele...