Every Edition of D&D: A Brief History of D&D (Patreon)

Over a decade ago, I wrote A Nomenclature of D&D Editions, which provided a definitive breakdown of every edition of D&D that had been published (along with the names by which they are commonly referred). I thought it would be useful to update the list and translate it into a video format.

I also thought that it would a quick, fun little video that I could turn out pretty quickly while working on other, more elaborate videos.

I was completely wrong about this.

First, what can basically just be a quick list in text format just... doesn't work that way as a video. So the project quickly transmogrified into a history of D&D as viewed through the lens of its many editions. Which is great.

It turned out the most time-consuming part of making the video was actually sourcing the cover images for every edition. I had sort of naively assumed that, hey, it's D&D. There'll definitely be easy-to-find scans of these covers out there.

But there wasn't!

Most of the books have been scanned, but it turns out a lot of those scans are from 10 or 15 or 20 years ago and have just been passed around the 'net ever since. They're low-res, blurry, and unsuitable for the video. In other cases, high-res scans exist... but only of copies which were in incredibly crappy condition. Boxed sets were particularly difficult to source: people would either only scan the rulebooks inside; or the box cover itself would be bettered and dented from years of play.

(This was particularly true of starter sets and basic games: These are often the first D&D products people buy, and so even future collectors are not yet treating them with care.)

You'd think the official PDFs would make it easier, but these are frequently the worst offenders when it comes to low-res, fuzzy, badly cropped scans of damaged copies of the book.

So I ended up spending hours and hours and hours sourcing cover images. This included frequently photoshopping images and also scanning in items from my own collection.

The most difficult images to find? The D&D Essentials line from 2010-11. I think partly because it didn't sell very well and partly because it didn't hang around long enough for people to write think-pieces about it (and scan covers to illustrate it).

(Also because there were so frickin' many Essentials products.)

And then, of course, there were hours more of carefully incorporating and animating the covers into the video itself!

In any case, it's done! Hopefully it was worth it!