Jean Rabe

Early life 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. 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.

Career

Journalism After graduating from university, Rabe worked as a newspaper reporter and bureau chief for the Quincy Herald-Whig in Quincy, Illinois. Rabe joined the Evansville Courier & Press in Evansville, Indiana in late 1983, covering critical news subjects like labor relations, prison conditions, and groundwater contamination, but frequently writing stories which highlighted her love of animals. Before Christmas 1985, reporter Rabe was dispatched to Fort Campbell, Kentucky to cover President Reagan's visit consoling family members after a tragic crash at Gander, Newfoundland took the lives of 256 servicemen and crew. Although others got the front page bylines, the Courier & Press credited Rabe with essential journalism which significantly affected the coverage. Rabe later worked as a stringer for the Rockford Register Star. 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.

Rabe became the editor of a BattleTech magazine, MechForce Quarterly, in 1995. 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).

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. Rabe worked with Janet Pack on The Forces of Dagnarus for the Sovereign Stone role-playing game. She wrote science fiction stories for Martin H. Greenberg's office in Green Bay, Wisconsin,

Rabe was the business manager and later the editor of the bimonthly SFWA Bulletin, published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. 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.

Awards 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".

In 2020 the IAMTW elected her Grandmaster.