News has sadly broken that fantasy author and tabletop RPG legend Jean Rabe has passed away at the age of 68. She is best-known for her contributions to the Dragonlance fantasy setting and Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game.
Born in Ottawa, Illinois, Rabe was a keen gamer as a child, starting with checkers and chess and moving up to wargames as a teenager. In 1974 she was introduced to the newly-launched Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. She worked in journalism through the 1980s before leaving the field to join TSR, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, in 1987.
At TSR she ran the RPGA Network, wrote articles for Dragon Magazine and penned novels and adventure modules for D&D and Gamma World. She became particularly noted for her contributions to the Dragonlance series. In 1996 she penned the books marking the start of the Dragonlance Fifth Age gaming era.
She also edited a BattleTech magazine, MechForce Quarterly, worked for Imperium Games and wrote fiction in other D&D settings as well as the Star Wars and Shadowrun universes. In 2005 she served as a juror for the Andre Norton Award for YA Fiction; she knew Norton and had co-written multiple works with her. Rabe also was the business manager and editor of the SFWA Bulletin until 2013.
After a hiatus in the early 2010s, Rabe returned to writing and publishing with the successful Piper Blackwell Mysteries urban fantasy series, which extended to six novels published from 2018 to 2023. Her last novel was The Love-Haight Case Files, cowritten with Donald J. Bingle, published in 2024.
Rabe's Dragonlance novels include the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, Maquesta Kar-Thon (with Tina Daniell), the Dhamon Saga and The Stonetellers series. She also wrote the Forgotten Realms novel Red Magic, three Endless Quest novels, the Shadowrun novel Aftershock, and multiple books with Andre Norton, including Return to Quag Keep, a sequel to the very first D&D-based work of fiction.
Rabe was also a prolific editor, editing sixteen anthologies from 2001 to 2013, mostly for DAW.
As well as gaming and journalism, Rabe was a keen animal-lover. She is survived by her husband Bruce Rabe. She will be very much missed.
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