Early Gaming Networks

[Havard]

I've been looking into these gaming clubs and networks that existed prior to the creation of D&D. I am wondering how much impact they may have had on things:


The International Federation of Wargaming (IFW)
This seems to be the grandmother of the gaming associations. Notably Gygax is among the founders.

The International Federation of Wargaming (IFW) was founded by Gary Gygax, Bill Speer, and Scott Duncan in 1966.Originally named the United States Continental Army Command,[3] the organization served as an umbrella for local wargaming clubs such as the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association and the Midwest Military Simulation Association. The IFW was divided into chapters with specialized interests, such as the Castle & Crusade Society, which promoted medieval wargaming, and the Armored Operations Society, which emphasized World War II wargaming.

The IFW held its first annual convention in Malvern, Pennsylvania in July 1967. By publishing a magazine (called The Spartan in 1969 and later called International Wargamer) and sponsoring the early Gen Cons, the IFW helped wargamers share ideas and meet wargamers from different parts of the country. The IFW ceased functioning around 1974.

The Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA)
Gygax' local club, less interesting with regards to Arneson & Blackmoor, but interesting in terms of the origins of TSR.

The Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) was a prominent wargaming club active in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin during the 1960s and 1970s. Its membership included Gary Gygax, Terry and Rob Kuntz, Jeff Perren, Mike Reese, Leon Tucker, and Don Kaye.[1] The organization usually met weekly in Gygax's basement.[2][3] When Gygax and Kaye founded Tactical Studies Rules (later TSR, Inc.) in 1973 to publish Dungeons & Dragons, they echoed part of the name of the LGTSA in the name of their new company.

The Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA)
This is the most important one when it comes to Blackmoor as it included so many of the key players.

The Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA) was a group of wargamers and military figurine collectors active during the late 1960s and 1970s when wargaming was in its heyday and role-playing games were first developed. The group lived in the Minneapolis-St Paul area. Its membership included Dave Arneson, David Wesely, Ken Fletcher, Dave Megarry, John and Richard Snider and others.[1]

In 2006 Wesely described how the club began:

The Midwest Military Simulation Association was founded on April 18, 1964 by Ray Allard, noted amateur historian and reenactor, now deceased. The first meeting was attended by Dr. William Musing, Loren Johnson, Ron Lauraunt and Winston Sandeen, Ray Allard Junior and David A. Wesely. Ray was about 54 at the time, the next four were all about 30 and the last two were teenagers. Besides age, the group was split by interest, with the five older guys being historians, collectors, modelers and painters of military miniatures, and the two youngest being wargamers. The older guys put up with us, and Winston Sandeen even played in a few miniatures battles, partly because we hung on their every word when they told war stories about WWII and the Korean War.

The ranks were augmented by friends of the original members, and one of these friends, Don Nicholson, recruited new members by contacting people who had checked out "Stategos: A Game of War" by Charles Totten at the UM library. In this way Jim Clark and Greg Scott were recruited. The MMSA also found new wargamers by running welcome tables during fall registration at the UM and the University of St. Thomas, or by running ads in The General and Strategy & Tactics magazines.

Dave Arneson joined when he was in high school. He produced a newsletter describing the group's Napoleonic and American Civil War games, as well as its play-by-mail Diplomacy games. The younger members of the group began to meet at Arneson's house. More interested in wargaming than collecting or historical reenactment, these members played a critical role in the development of RPGs. Dave Wesely conducted what is considered to be the first role-playing game, set in Napoleonic Germany, in 1967. Arneson later developed a fantasy role-playing milieu called Blackmoor, and co-created Dungeons & Dragons with Gary Gygax in 1973. Dave Megarry conceived the idea of a dungeon crawl, and designed a board game around this idea called Dungeon!, published by TSR, Inc. in 1975. That same year TSR also published Star Probe by John Snider.

Unlike most of the wargaming clubs formed in the 1960s, the MMSA is still active.

Castle & Crusade Society
The C&C Society with its shifted focus towards fantasy, founded by Gygax only two years before Dave Arneson sits down and invents Blackmoor. Its newsletter is also where the first published info about Blackmoor appears.

Formed by Gary Gygax in 1968, the Castle & Crusade Society was a chapter of the International Federation of Wargaming dedicated to medieval miniature wargaming.[1]

Its membership included Gary Gygax, Rob Kuntz and Dave Arneson.

The C&CS published a newsletter called the Domesday Book. Circulation of this newsletter would never exceed 80 copies, but its issues contained a set of rules called the LGTSA miniatures rules which would be expanded and published by Guidon Games as Chainmail in 1971; this being one of the primary predecessors of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules role-playing game.

Issue #13 of the Domesday Book also published the first details and map of Blackmoor from Dave Arneson's first fantasy role-playing campaign in July 1972.[2]

The Castles & Crusades Society officially re-launched as an online society dedicated to supporting and promoting gaming, especially RPGs, in 2008. The Domesday Book was re-launched with new, quarterly editions beginning in April 2008.

Quotes are from the Wikipedia.

-Havard

[Rafael]

You send me that timeline I have been asking you for, and perhaps I am gonna share.

(Hint: I researched that for a book not too long ago. Like, it's probable I know something you won't come to know on a public board.)

[Havard]

Will share it with you when its revised and corrected.

-Havard

[Havard]

Doing some research for my recent article on Dan Nicholson, I revisited this topic.

I also took another look some posts by Dave Wesely that are relevant for the topic of the MMSA:

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I think Christmas 1967 is right. I went off to Grad school in '67 and had months to plan the game, and no one to game with, so I came home with the burning desire to do something "memorable". Some of the guys who were in the game have suggested that this was a year later, after I enlisted in the USAR (June '68), but before I reported for active duty (July '70), or even earlier (Thanksgiving '67 or '68). I know Dave Arneson was publishing a club newsletter at the time and he may have an old issue that would settle this. In fact, he probably had to settle this date as part of the "Who Invented D&D" lawsuit between him and Gary, so I guess it would be well documented somewhere. I know I was home from college and went back feeling that Braunstein had flopped.
My next vacation (Christmas '67 or Easter 68?) I came back to discover that everyone wanted another Braunstein. I created BS 2 (set in Latin America) before the next vacation (Easter or summer '68?) and ran it twice (two flops) with heavy rule changes, so I think of the second run of BS 2 as 'BS 3'. Then I figured out what the key to making it work was, and developed BS 4 - A much nicer scenario, complete with about 100 Airfix civilians and soldiers, tanks, helicopters and armored cars marked with the national insignia ('en vert, bannana rampant or') a lot of other props and a map of PIEDRAS MORENAS the capital of BANNANIA [SHofD&D has mis-spelled this], which I set up on the folding plywood ping-pong table [this historical object is still preserved, waiting for the national D&D hall of fame to be founded] in Dave Arneson's basement. Fortunately, BS2 and BS3 had been played by only four people each time, so there were still a lot of people waiting for my next Braunstein. I ran the one game, it was a big hit. I went back to school. Dave ran several more on the same table, shuffling the players and changing some of the objectives between my visits home. I went off to the Army, telling Dave he could keep running the games without me (he asked if it was OK, which seemed awfully polite, since it was all set up in his basement). And I also expected to go off to Vietnam and get killed, so I did not really care a lot about who "owned" Braunstein.

Looking at this time line, it seems very possible that, since I left for active Duty in Oct'70, the first BS 4 or "Bannania" game could have been as late as early summer '70 and the original Braunstein in Christams '68. As I said, Arneson has it documented somewhere.

Unless one defines "fantasy" as "imagining you are a spy in Central America" I did not run a "first fantasy role-playing game" in 1969, but I did run a "first role-playing game" at least as early as late 1968, and maybe 1967.

While I was in the Army (for three years in the US and Alaska, but not in Vietnam, as it turned out) Arneson ran a series of Braunsteins in Bannania, and the one of the other guys (Duane Jenkins, I think) did some Western Braunsteins (in Brownstone, Texas, I think) with the Mexican Bandid "El Pauncho" (David Arneson) crossing the border to rob the bank,
so sort of inspired by the 1916 Poncho Villa raid, but mostly by hollywood westerns. I only heard about these games dimly, getting a few letters from Dave. The 1919 Russia Braunstein and the 1941 Polish Braunstein were planned a lot while I was off in the army, but before I got back, Dave had started Blackmoor, the fantasy precursor to D&D, and further Braunsteins never got going. I still have the Authenticast WWI tanks and WW2 planes I was going to use for props... "So Comrade, are your mechanics going to finish assembling and testing the new MiG3 fighters for our squadron, or are they going to attend my lecture on The Inevitable Triumph of the Proletariate under the Leadership of Marshal Stalin?"
(Correct answer is "Yes Comrade Commisar!")

By the way, it was shortly after I came back on leave the first time that
David Megarry discovered "the Dungeon" Arneson drew up the first Dungeon map for a Blackmoor adventure that was expected to run one day and then (probably) the map would be brough back out if anyone ever went there again. We played, everyone agreed that the game had gone really smoothly, and the next day we were back out in the kingdom, escorting some merchants through the woods or whatever. Then Dave Megarry arrived with teh prototype "Dungeon" game under his arm. He had distilled the complex, open-ended Blackmoor dungeno crawl into a simple but practical board game. He had also identified that, by restricting the players to a limited set of options (go left, or right, or back, and not "NbyNW for three minutes. Now can the dragons see them there or not..." the Dungeon made everything manageable. He and Dave Arneson discussed this, and from then on, the Dungeon was where most of the action was going to take place.

Of course we played Diplomacy. It was one of the very few intelligent "war" games on the market (besides those published by Avalon Hill) back in the early 60's It was a multiplayer game - which the early AH games really were not - and we also played Risk, Summit (try to find a copy of that one!) and Conflict as well as Monopoly, Clue, Carreers, etc.
I think I was more inspired by Careers (each player sets their own secret victory conditions) than by Diplomacy (every players only objective is to conquer the world).

The Midwest_Military_Simulation_Association was founded on 18APR64 by Ray Allard, noted amateur historian and reinactor (now deceased).
The first meeting was attended by Dr. William Musing, Loren Johnson, Ron Lauraunt and Winston Sandeen, Ray Allard Junior and David A. Wesely.
Ray was about 54 at the time, the next four were all about 30 and the last two were teenagers. Besides age, the gropu was split by interest, with the five older guys being historians, collectors, modelers and paiters of military miniatures, and the two youngest being wargamers.
The older guys put up with us, (and Winston Sandeen even played in a few miniatures battles) partly because we hung on their every word when they told war stories about WWII and the Korean War.
The group expnaded with the recruitment of a more friends of these starters. Dan Nicholson joined up, bringing in another group of gamers who had each checked Strategos, the American Game of War out of the UofM library (he got their names off the library card in the back of the book): amoung them were Jim Clark and Gregg Scott.
Eventually, there were enough wargamers that the collectors and gamers drifted apart, meeting toghther only occaisionally. I and the gamers started gathering every weekend at the home of Greg Scott (who soon started CinC Soft Metal Casting). Pete Gaylord, Dave Arneson, and a group of Avalon Hill gamers who knew Arneson in High School joined. Eventually, the group became too large again, and the younger, more wargame-oriented members moved over to Dave Arneson's house (which made me and Dan Nicholson the old men of the group)
The group had reached about 60 people (including some who had moved away and were still playing in Arneson's Napoleonic Campaign by mail) by the time I ran the first Braunstein, but only 8-12 would usually show up for a game at one time. Looking back, this implies that we were one of the largest gaming groups in the US, not counting the non-gaming mimiatures collectors centered around Ray Allard.

I think MMSA is still officially alive with a new set of gamers and collectors running it. I dropped into a meeting back in the 1990's and found them discussing whether to split up into a collector/modeler/painter goup and a gamer group... They were pretty amazed when I told them who I was, and that we had had the same meeting about 30 years earlier...

Arneson produced COTT ("Corner of the Table Talk" a title inspired by "Table Top Talk" the newsletter Jack Scruby was running for his lead soldier company and wargaming group in California). This documented the on-going Diplomacy-by-mail game, the current ACW or Napoleonic Campaign in progress, and various club news, rules modifications, etc.

We were students, so we could meet for 72 straight hours very weekend, and a few nights a week (at various peoples houses to keep the parents from going nuts). I see us in every issue of Knights of the Dinner Table,
even before we were doing RPG's. We recruited other gamers taht we ran across in "opponants wanted" ads in The General or S&T, we were recognized as an official student organization at the UofM and at the University of St. Thomas, and ran "welcome" tables at fall registration,
we invited relatives and people we met in school to come and take a look.
And we got older and settled down and left the recruiting to "the kids", so now I do not know anyone in the MMSA, but there is a pretty busy group that meets at The Source, our local game store, and other groups that run our local Cons.

The first Braunstein used my self-published "Strategos-N" rules, or it would have, if there had actually been a battle (which I did not intend to happen, but I had some copies of those rules around to keep the players thnking one might). I also had a set of really cumbersome rules no one got to see, that spelled out how each player could score points and how to decide who won (highest score, "obviously"). I wound up with far more players than I had planned for, made up new characters off the top of my head, and could not begin to keep up with the action, so aside from ruling that the dead players could not win, I just gave up and threw out the scoring system. No those rules did not survive, but I did try to reconstruct them all of my talk at GenCon05.

The rules for BS2 and BS3 were also tossed when they flopped.

Some of the rules and props for BS4 - "Bannania" - survived, and I reconstructed the rest of the rules for my talk at GenCon05. If I get a bunch of fan mail asking me to put on the game at GenCon07 - instead of one of my typical talks like "Gas, Bugs and Nukes", "Women as Warriors",
"Bombs and Bombing in World War II", "Field Artillery in the American Civil War", "Tank and AntiTank", etc. I will probably run BS 4, since a bunch of modern RPG'ers would find BS 1 pretty unimaginative and it would be just as uncontrollable as it was the first time.

Hope this does some more good-

Source: https://www.acaeum.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 88&p=65640

-Havard