News — Jeff Laubenstein

In 1989 FASA’s Shadowrun was born, and with it, the genre of RP cyberpunk [it beat Gurps ‘Cyberpunk’ to the press by a year for all you haters]. This was a whole new world to explore and FASA turned to the up and coming talent of Jeff Laubenstein to bring it to market. Jeff was a genius of crafting with watercolor. His early works in the mid-1980s on the Battletech line of tabletop and RPG supplements helped enrich that war-torn universe of the inner sphere, but it wasn’t until we saw his concepts of a darker future that we truly...

In the beginning, there was Shadowrun… and it was good.  Then, in 1993, FASA created Earthdawn as the semi-precursor to their breakout cyberpunk hit.  Much like the world of Conan reflects an age of Earth long forgotten, Earthdawn filled this same pre-history, which I have to say was infinitely cool considering the story from which Shadowrun was born.  However, somewhere along the line FASA took a turn that would unfortunately doom the game to a moderate hit that fell quickly into mediocrity.  To me, FASA had no concept of its own OGL, and thus failed to realize that the game...

Ok, just for anyone who doesn’t know, I love the art of Jeff Laubenstein, so any review I do with his artwork is going to be skewed in the direction of the positive.  Having established, of the pre-1990 FASA Battletech supplements, this has to be one of the finest out there. I once ran a full mercenary company in the game and this book was an incredibly valuable resource, having information so detailed that there is even a contract that can be copied and signed for each mission your crew intends to take on.  In fact, using this book, I...