The first edition of Designers & Dragons (2011), published by Mongoose, hit their warehouse on October 10, 2011. Within a week, they were fulfilling preorders. At that point, I decided that I needed to figure out what to do with my RPGnet column, previously called “A Brief History of Game”. The problem was that the column was full of histories that were now a part of Designers & Dragons.
I didn’t mind them remaining online, because I knew the editions in print were better edited and more comprehensive, and besides that there were another 40 or so of them that had never been seen online. But, I wanted my RPGnet column to support the book, and that wouldn’t work if people logged on and saw a bunch of articles they’d already read. So, I rebooted “A Brief History of Game”, and this time used the name that we’d settled on for the book for a new column at RPGnet: “Designers & Dragons: The Column”.
My original intent with “Designers & Dragons: The Column” was to write shorter histories: “mini-history, magazine history, or discussion of a ‘setting of yore'”. These were histories that appeared as boxes in the first edition of Designers & Dragons. There’s a bit of that in the column. But, it turned out that I couldn’t stop myself from writing longer pieces. So there are company histories as well.
Fortunately, I’d have an opportunity to incorporate all of that new material into a new edition of the book a few years down the road, because of the short print run of Mongoose’s Designers & Dragons. The vast majority of these articles published as “Designers & Dragons: The Column” thus appear in the four-book second edition of Designers & Dragons (2014) from Evil Hat. If you’re looking for new material, to supplement those books, you should thus move forward to the “Advanced Designers & Dragons” column.