Jeff Perren

Life

By the late 1960s Jeff Perren was a miniatures wargamer in the circle around Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Hobbyist sources give his birth date as July 25, 1947. He was an early member of the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, the club that met in Gygax's basement from 1970, and later ran a hobby shop. He has kept a low public profile compared with the other founders of the roleplaying hobby, and much of what is known about him comes from fellow gamers' recollections and occasional interviews.

(Some reference lists have given Perren a death year of 2011. Public appeals on his behalf in 2015 and tributes marking his 70th birthday in 2017 show that this is mistaken.)

Work

Perren's great contribution was a short piece of rules writing. In 1970 the Lake Geneva club acquired a set of Elastolin figures, the German plastic medieval soldiers popular with collectors, and Perren drafted four pages of rules for mass medieval combat so the group could play with them. Gygax, an energetic editor and publisher of club newsletters, expanded and revised the text. A version appeared as "Geneva Medieval Miniatures" in Panzerfaust magazine in April 1970, and a revised set as the "LGTSA Miniatures Rules" in The Domesday Book, newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society, that July. Later issues added man-to-man combat and jousting.

In March 1971 Guidon Games published the whole package as Chainmail, credited to Gygax and Perren. It combined Perren's mass-combat core, Gygax's one-to-one rules and a 14-page Fantasy Supplement that let players field heroes, wizards, elves, orcs and dragons inspired by Tolkien, Robert E. Howard and others. Frank Mentzer, a later TSR designer, has described Perren as the compiler who gathered the club's ideas and shaped them into a coherent set of medieval rules.

Chainmail sold steadily (Guidon reported about a hundred copies a month) and went through a second edition in 1972 and a TSR third edition in 1975. Perren and Gygax also collaborated on Cavaliers and Roundheads, a set of English Civil War rules that in 1973 became the very first product of the new company TSR, Inc..

Legacy

Chainmail's importance is out of all proportion to its size. When Dave Arneson began his Blackmoor campaign in 1971, he started from its fantasy rules before building his own. And when Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons in 1973, the new game still referred readers to Chainmail for combat, offering an "alternative" system that soon became standard. The idea that a figure's armor makes it harder to hit, a direct ancestor of Armor Class, and the practice of giving heroes and wizards special powers against lesser troops, both passed through Chainmail.

Perren has said he received no royalties from Chainmail. His memorial in the fiction of D&D is geographic: Perrenland, a northern nation in the World of Greyhawk, bears his name. Detailed histories of the hobby, notably Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (2012), have since restored his place as the first author of the medieval rules on which D&D's combat was built.