Wargaming - creating artificial armies in order to act or reenact military conflicts - is older than chess, but the real stuff, with maps, miniatures and rules, was more or less restricted to the elite, who could afford them. This lasted until the late 19th century, when the wealth of the middle class began to close in on the wealth of the upper class. In the early 20th century, H.G. Wells, known more for being one of the founding fathers of specfic, codified rules for wargaming. These rules covered real world military units and were intended to be used chiefly for reenacting, but, while we have no actual evidence of this, observation of modern wargamers would seem to indicate that they were used for more than this purpose.
The first incident of fantasy wargaming that we have on record dates from 1916, although it's indirectly reported. Canadian author Timothy Findley, who interviewed a large number of WWI veterans and used their stories in his own fiction, recounts a couple of officers who, after hours, would take the little standees on the battle map and re-run the battles of the day, arguing over the relative strengths and abilities of the individual units. Warhammer fans know how that goes.
Why is it fantasy wargaming? They re-ran the battles in an effort to minimize casualties, reducing the loss of life in what remains one of the bloodiest, most horrific wars in history.
Wargaming became a much bigger and more formal sort of thing post WWII, both because some returning soldiers maintained an interest in military matters, and because of the discovery of a process by which the expense pewter and lead miniatures could be replaced with rubber models.
Still, this was mostly real-world stuff - musketeers, Hussar cavalry, German tanks and the like.
At this point, tradition would have me start talking about Chainmail, Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons and the like, but I'm going off in a different direction today, one that I'd argue is just as important, if not more so: Greg Stafford.
Greg Stafford was an English major with a prolific imagination, and a nascent interest in shamanism, and he had this idea for an interactive fantasy world called "Glorantha." No publishers wanted it, so he created a company to produce it - Chaosium.
Over the ensuing decades, he would create, or, with assistance, create RuneQuest, Pendragon and Call of Chtulhu. While TSR sued its fans for producing and sharing their own content, Stafford and company created an environment of collaboration. There aren't as many, say, RuneQuest fans as there are D&D players, but those fans are dedicated in no small part because of the excellence of the game's founder.
That love of creating stuff with other people, which is at the heart of roleplaying, doesn't solely originate in Greg Stafford, but if that optimistic collaboration has a patron saint, it would be him.
Well, it would've been him. He died a day or so ago. But. BUT. Every time you sit around a table with a group of people and make up stories together, rolling dice, swilling Mountain Dew and laughing, Greg Stafford remains. I get the feeling he's going to be around for a while.
