Jean Rabe

Jean Rabe was born in Ottawa, Illinois, and learned to play games at an early age — checkers, chess, and euchre by the age of 7, and board wargames in high school.[2] In 1974 she enrolled in journalism at Northern Illinois University. In her junior year, while attending the inaugural Windycon games convention, she was introduced to the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which had just been published by TSR earlier that year.[2] She subsequently took up the game as a hobby and social activity. She graduated from Northern Illinois with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism.[3]

After graduating from university, Rabe worked as a newspaper reporter and bureau chief for the Quincy Herald-Whig in Quincy, Illinois, before moving to the Evansville Courier & Press in Evansville, Indiana. She then worked as a stringer for the Rockford Register Star.[1]

She was hired by TSR as the Director of the RPGA.[4] She also used her writing skills to create magazine articles and novels. In addition, Rabe wrote and edited Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World adventure modules (see list below).

Rabe became the editor of a BattleTech magazine, MechForce Quarterly, in 1995.[1] For Dragonlance, TSR had Rabe write the next major event for Krynn after Dragons of Summer Flame, which came to be the Dragons of a New Age trilogy, beginning with The Dawning of a New Age (1996).[5]

When Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR, they published the rest of Rabe's Dragons of a New Age trilogy before bringing back Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman as the main authors of Dragonlance.[5] Her Dragons of a New Age trilogy consisted of Dawning of a New Age, Day of the Tempest, and Eve of the Maelstrom.[1] Her other Dragonlance work includes Maquesta Kar-Thon, co-authored with Tina Daniell, and The Silver Star. Her other work for TSR includes Red Magic, Secret of the Djinn, and Night of the Tiger.[1] Rabe worked with Janet Pack on The Forces of Dagnarus for the Sovereign Stone role-playing game.[1]

She has also written more than four dozen short stories, including those set in the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Star Wars settings. Three of her Star Wars short stories — "The Breath of Gelgelar", "Day of the Sepulchral Night", and "The Farrimmer Cafe" —have been published in the Star Wars Adventure Journals.[1][6] She has written science fiction stories for Martin H. Greenberg's office in Green Bay, Wisconsin,[1] and coedited a number of all-original anthologies with Greenberg for DAW Books(see list below).

Rabe has also written articles for On The Lake, a local magazine for tourists.[1]

In 2005, Rabe served as a juror for the Andre Norton Award for young adult fiction, which was established that year.[7]

Rabe was the business manager and later the editor of the bimonthly SFWA Bulletin, published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.[8] In June 2013, Rabe resigned the post in the course of a controversy about alleged sexism in SFWA Bulletin articles written by, among others, Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg.[9]

Dragonlance: Death March was nominated for the 2009 Special Gaming Scribe Award — awarded by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers — for "Best Original gaming-related tie-in novel of 2009.[10]

• "Rabe's website". Archived from the original on September 30, 2007.
• "Rabe's roleplaying game credits". Archived from the original on December 15, 2008.
• Jean Rabe at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database