D&D: A History In Miniatures – Prime
Minis are all but written into the DNA of D&D. Throughout the last forty-five years, these pewter and plastic figures have put adventurers on the map.
Dungeons & Dragons might be the dominant force in the tabletop roleplaying world–but it would be nothing if not for the miniatures that came before it. Before Heroforge, before Reaper and their patented formulas, before even Ral Partha there was the fledgling wargaming community in North America. It all starts a little more than sixty years ago, with the rise of miniatures wargaming in America.
In 1955, a California man named Jack Scruby began making inexpensive miniature models for miniature wargames out of type metal. Scruby’s major contribution to the miniature wargaming hobby was to network players across America and the UK. At the time, the miniature wargaming community was minuscule, and players struggled to find each other. In 1956, Scruby organized the first miniature wargaming convention in America, which was attended by just fourteen people. From 1957 to 1962, he self-published the world’s first miniature wargaming magazine, titled The War Game Digest, through which wargamers could publish their rules and share game reports. It had less than two hundred subscribers, but it did establish a community that kept growing.
The War Game Digest & The General
The War Game Digest was by no means the only one–perhaps the most successful was the magazine started by former Avalon Hill creator Charles Swann Roberts II, The General, which helped coalesce the community that was clustering around wargaming at the time.
Before he left the company, however, Roberts conceived of a magazine that would provide marketing for Avalon Hill’s products, as well as columns on game strategy, design and the like. Under the anonymous editorship of Shaw, the Avalon Hill General debuted on May 1, 1964. Counterintuitive as this may sound, it is because of the existence and careful stewardship of the General that any serious history of Dungeons & Dragons must begin with Avalon Hill. Through the medium of the General, wargames fans united into a national community, a wargaming fandom, which proved essential to future game development. Of course, the success of wargaming had many fathers, when we look outside of Avalon Hill: Jack Scruby, for example, incubated the infant miniature wargaming hobby community of the 1950s as he built his seminal business around the manufacture and sale of military miniatures. Scruby also recruited English wargamers Tony Bath and Don Featherstone as co-editors of his early hobby magazine, the War Game Digest, a periodical that had already run for several years (and folded) well before the first issue of the General; Featherstone would in turn edit the bellwether miniature wargaming journal of the 1960s and 1970s, Wargamer’s Newsletter. One would similarly be remiss to neglect Alan B. Calhamer: his Diplomacy (1959), a more abstract and political game with greater popular appeal than the initial Avalon Hill titles, went on to storm classrooms everywhere and reportedly the inner cloisters of the Kennedy White House.
The early days of wargaming in America give us an interesting look at what the hobby was like and how it has grown. From ads that would be taken out in gaming magazines like The General where people advertising for ‘Opponents Wanted’ would try and find someone else out there playing the game they were. Avalon Hill published play-by-mail kits so that armchair generals around the country could play with each other, while in the pages of the magazine a curious roleplay developed. Clubs would form, claiming “command” of a particular state. One ad talked about granting territory to people if they joined SPECTRE.
Yes, that SPECTRE. In response to these claims, clubs would pop up dedicating themselves to the downfall of SPECTRE, and the whole thing seemed like something to do other than actually get to a table and play the game you’re so interested in. But the point is clear. Wargaming was on the rise in America.
Scruby & Chainmail
Not long after the exchanges in these magazines were causing drama among gaming clubs, the first few conventions started to spring up. Gen Con (a convention whose name you’ll recognize) first debuted in 1968 through the International Federation of Wargamers. That’s where the first influences for D&D come about. At this first Gen Con, Gary Gygax gets involved in medieval miniatures games, checking out a demo of a game called Siege of Bodenberg, which would then go on to inspire the “Geneva Medieval Miniatures” game first published in the April 1970 issue of wargaming fanzine Panzerfaust. This game would later evolve into Chainmail, a medieval miniatures combat game that adopted two key rules of note: man-to-man combat rules, which are the combat rules that are still at the heart of D&D. These took wargaming from things that had 10 or 20 soldiers represented by a single model and reduced it to a 1-1 scale.
But before we get to Chainmail, we’ve got to talk about the miniatures landscape at the time. We mentioned Scruby and his metal miniatures. At the time, Scruby was one of the biggest names in miniatures. In addition to producing and selling metal miniatures, he published newsletters that helped publicize them, as well as giving avid gamers instructions on how to use them. Here’s a snippet from one of his newsletters, Table Top Talk which talked about the way you might use some roman miniatures, which reported a great deal of historical accuracy.
All of this to say, miniatures and wargaming were becoming more and more intertwined across the Americas. Granted, this is all catching up to other games like HG Wells’ Little Wars, but the connections were forged, and the years performed their terrible dance. Not a very long one, at the tail end of the 60s, and going into the 70s, another kind of miniatures-based game was taking hold in conventions.
From Braunstein to D&D
D&D’s other founder, Dave Arneson, found at these early conventions, a less structured, more informal, open-ended miniatures game called a “Braunstein.” Braunsteins–so named for the fictional town that the original iteration of the game took place in–were multiplayer miniatures wargames that featured two commanders of opposing armies, but would also assign additional, non-military roles. Players might take on the role of the town mayor, or banker, or university chancellor. And it’s here that we really see the truest form of an RPG, even in the days before D&D, as outlined in the Evolution of Fantasy Roleplaying Games:
“When nearly twenty people showed up [originator of the Braunstein, David Wesley] made up roles for them too. It was telling that the players received their orders in a separate room where Wesley briefed them, and were not allowed to share the information with each other. What was supposed to be an orderly set of instructions fell apart when two of the players, one an officer in the Prussian army, and the other a pro-French radical student, told Wesley they had challenged each other to a duel. Wesley was once again forced to improvise; he rolled some dice and declared that one had shot the other, with the winner imprisoned. The game continued well into the night, at which point Wesley realized that the players had taken over the game–his carefully crafted rules that would ultimately help determine who won no longer applied.”
This last part is the truest expression of any roleplaying game. You come up with rules to determine who wins the scenario, how it’s going to play out, and try to anticipate everything your players will do, and they go and do everything except the thing you expected them to do. You can pretty much count on it. But, Arneson experimented undeterred, and his initial tinkering with Braunsteins led to the creation of a medieval fantasy scenario incorporating ideas from the Lord of the Rings which would then shift in focus to dungeon exploration in Blackmoor. And in 1973, born out of Blackmoor and Chainmail, Arneson and Gygax created a game of cooperative exploration in a fantasy world that looked wildly different from the game we know today.
“It featured four races, (humans, dwarves, elves, and hobbits) and just three classes (fighting-men, magic-users, and clerics). It also introduced individual statistics that had never existed before: Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. This was a quantum leap from wargames of the past, as the statistics described an individual person, not a unit.”
But Chainmail bears mentioning just a little more because it sets the stage for the miniatures and the game to come. Chainmail leaned heavily on many of the concepts still used in D&D today. Difficult terrain, fatigue, different movement modes:
Chainmail is a fully fleshed out fantasy miniatures game that puts YOU in charge of your very own army. Whether you want to fight historical battles based in the trenches of reality or fantasy battles rife with magic and fantastic beasts, Chainmail gives you the rules to fight the wars you want to fight!
The Chainmail Medieval Miniatures section features rules for terrain, movement, formations, fatigue, and more. The Fantasy Supplement provides information for Dwarves, Goblins, Elves, magic, fantastic monsters, and other rules necessary for combat in a magical setting.
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A Need for Miniatures
And you needed miniatures to play the game–which was basically four different wargame systems. You had the mass-combat rules that were based heavily on the medieval miniatures games of Tony Bath and played at a 20:1 scale, with 20 “troops” per actual model on the table. Then there were the man-to-man combat rules, which were the 1:1 models, which is where we see the earliest form of THAC0 and the first use of Armor Class.
Chainmail also featured jousting rules, a favorite of the Castle & Crusade Society, that was originally designed for play-by-post games, but adapted for Chainmail rules (still referred to in the early D&D rulesets), and fantasy combat rules for wizards and monsters and such.
But perhaps the biggest innovation of Chainmail are the castle siege rules and underground wargames that can only be “conducted on paper” which required a referee to manage underground spaces on graph paper–later seen in the form of battlemaps. With all that in mind, here’s a look at the first few sets of miniatures produced for fantasy wargames like Chainmail.
These are some of Scruby’s original fantasy miniatures. Developed in 1975 in response to the growing popularity of Chainmail, these figures are at the 30mm scale that Chainmail recommends. You might not be able to make everything out, but you can feel the Lord of the Rings inspiration. Here you’ll find trolls and ents and orcs, and a wizard with a staff alongside the heroic miniature with sword and shield.
Here’s a set by Der Kriegspielers. These are Der Fantastiques, which is once again pretty much a Tolkien-inspired endeavour. Those are Wood Elves of Fair Countenance. But you could also find Shirefolk, if you were in need of townspeople and hobbits, as well as Men of Goodly Nature and various flavors of orcs and goblins and trolls.
The other big company was Minifigs, with their Sword and Sorcery line started back in 1975. Here’s a Barbarian Warrior Princess:
Minifigs would go on to be the first official producers of D&D miniatures in 1977–but before that there were some early unofficial versions, perhaps the most notable of these is Archive Miniatures.
One of the earliest producers of fantasy miniatures was Archive, who produced excellent miniatures as early as 1976 which were much more artistic than other figures available at the time. Archive miniatures were stout, solid figures, not the flimsy handle with care figures generally produced during that period. They are simple, yet very stylish and a blast to paint. While not an official Dungeon & Dragons producer, Archive produced many creatures specific to the D&D world, such as ropers. They were also one of the only miniature producers to ever produce a bullette, calling it a sharkadillo.
That looks like a Sharkadillo alright. They produced a number of other fantasy miniatures and were basically the Asylum pictures to D&D’s monsters. Sharkadillo was accompanied by
Entman, and a range of heroic adventurers like the Cimmerian and the She-Devil who carried swords and shields, but what we’re far more excited to show you are some of their other monstrous minions. Like this serviceable griffon:
The King Rat:
And the new bane of adventurers everywhere, the one monster more deserving of a comeback and official rules than any other creature we’ve seen yet, the Barbarian Duck.
Archive miniatures was not the only producer, but they by far produced some of the best unofficial miniatures. Now, one thing that’s particularly interesting, is that despite the fact that D&D was officially subtitled “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures” nowhere in the official rules were people expected to have a miniature figurine. In fact, in the earliest editions of the game, miniature figures were entirely optional:
Miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing.
Gygax’s Take On Miniatures
Now, while Gygax was evolving the game beyond Chainmail, it’s worth noting that he would continually downplay the role of miniatures in D&D:
Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.
Or as Gygax himself is on record saying:
I don’t usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D.
I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour.
The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming.
I don’t believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.
Enter Minifigs
Now that might be the prevailing attitude, but if you call your game a miniatures game, people are going to want the miniatures. And in 1977, three years after the official release of D&D, Minifigs, based out of the UK would go on to produce the first official line of D&D miniatures.
In 1977 Minifigs of England became the first official D&D miniature supplier, though having made fantasy miniatures as early as 1975. Minifigs, like most miniatures of the time, were made for gaming purposes, not collecting or artistic purposes and so the sculptures are largely crude, lacking detail and poorly cast. All weapons, even weapons such as clubs and maces are frail and thus prone to breaking – they really do not make good gaming pieces. A few of their D&D figures, however, have a unique style and presence of their own, especially the large demons such as demon prince Demogorgon.
Minifigs also makes some of the best Kobold miniatures you’ll ever see.
Critical Role fans looking for a Spurt miniature might do him justice if they can find one of the old Minifigs creations. Minifigs didn’t hold the license indefinitely though. Minifigs was based out of the United Kingdom, but back in 1974, the US importer of Minifigs left the company to found his own: Heritage Models. Heritage stepped in to try and snap up the license, but by 1979 had not secured the deal–needless to say, they pressed on and produced a line of Dungeon Dwellers.
Onto Grenadier
But by 1980, the official license had gone to Grenadier Models, who would spend the next three years producing miniatures, though they had already been producing since 1976 with a line of miniatures titled Wizzards & Warriors.
In 1980 upon acquiring the license to produce AD&D miniatures, Grenadier redid the box art for the Wizzards & Warriors line, changed a few miniatures and released them as official AD&D miniatures in golden/yellow packaging, calling the line “The Solid Gold Line” to infer that lead, in the form of their miniatures, had been made to have the worth of gold to the D&D gamer. In Addition to the repackaged boxed sets, Grenadier produced many more boxed sets and twenty blisters in the years 1980 through 1982. A few miniatures from the Wizzards & Warriors blisters were brought into their AD&D line, though most were left behind as their detail was inferior compared to the new standards of the 80’s.
These initial sets came packed in foam and had brightly colored pictures that made it easy to envision what exactly you were playing as, and this made them one of the more popular producers of miniatures at the time.
With the D&D license they could produce models for proprietary creatures like the Umber Hulk and the Xorn, as well as repackage many of their existing adventurer models for use with games of AD&D.
TSR Reclaims Control – briefly
But the 1980s brought some of the first tastes of trouble to TSR. As the company began undergoing its first big crisis of management, which would eventually lead to Gygax being oustered from the company he founded, the leaders at the time were looking to integrate as much of D&D as they could. And so by 1983, TSR became their own producers of official D&D miniatures.
Under the auspices of the big shakeup and integration, TSR took back their license to produce miniatures and started creating their own line. And showing the same zeal for expansion that would eventually lead to their downfall, TSR got to work producing several boxed sets to accompany their releases. In addition to a Dragonlance boxed set, you could find boxed sets based on the Conan movies, and then twelve “hero” blister packs and twelve “monster” blister packs.
Ironically, TSR’s line of miniatures is widely regarded as the least popular line of miniatures, both in terms of quality of the miniature–breakages were common–and the overall sculpts. There are a few that standout, and the packaging was second to none, even going so far as to include Dungeon Tiles that you could play on.
Citadel (yes that one) and Ral Partha Enter the Fray
When TSR’s rapid expansion nearly crashed the company the first time, and the company restructured itself, they stopped producing miniatures for a while. Instead, they gave the license briefly to Citadel Miniatures, whose name should be familiar to fans of all things grim and perilous.
There was even a big announcement of it in Issue #63 of White Dwarf:
As last month’s issue was going to press, I was just jumping on a plane to Dallas to see what the American games industry was going to offer us in 1985. It really was a little disappointing with most companies either vying for licensed characters or copying each other’s products. Whilst Games Workshop make the Dr Who boardgame, FASA have the licence to make the Dr Who role-playing game and although FASA make the Star Trek role- playing game, West End Games have the licence to make the Star Trek boardgame. It’s all very confusing. TSR are planning to release AD&D Battlesystem which sounds like Warhammer, and Super Endless Quest books to compete with Fighting Fantasy. And of the rest? Well, how about a Barbara Cartland game from Mayfair?!? But as promised, there was one important and excellent piece of news. Citadel will be manufacturing the official D&D and AD&D miniatures. They will be released in July and the first modules are superb. Stirges at last – aagh
Of course this match made in miniature heaven only lasted about 18 months before a more familiar name came to take the reins. Ral Partha, who would hold the official D&D license for another ten years, stepped in in 1987.
And the rest as they say is history. Ral Partha produced the stuff of legends. They leaned into D&D at the perfect time, coming on just before 2nd edition was released, and right around the time of the rise of the Campaign Setting.
Over their decade they’d produce minis for Planescape and Ravenloft:
As well as creating an excellent line of monsters…
…and heroes.
You can see the shift in quality as well. Compare Ral Partha’s packaging to that of D&D, and you can see the emphasis is on the models themselves, rather than an illustrated ideal. Eventually, Ral Partha would lose their license, and TSR would fold, leaving miniatures in the hands of WotC for a while. But from these humble origins, we get the seeds that would grow into the miniatures that many people play with today.
Happy Adventuring!
