Michael Austin Stackpole (born November 27, 1957)[1] is an American science fiction and fantasy author best known for his Star Wars and BattleTech books.

Michael Stackpole was hired full-time at Flying Buffalo after they accepted his submission for a solo Tunnels & Trolls adventure which was published in 1978 as City of Terrors.

[2]: 36  Stackpole designed the roleplaying game Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, which Flying Buffalo published in 1983.

[2]: 39  Stackpole, Ken St. Andre, and Liz Danforth designed the computer roleplaying game Wasteland, published by Interplay in 1988.

",[2]: 38  and even debated the Western Regional Director of Pulling's BADD organization on a radio program broadcast on July 14, 1987.

He also created the role-playing game Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, which provided the game mechanics for Wasteland, and wrote several solo adventures for the Tunnels & Trolls role-playing system, including "Dargon's Dungeon", "Overkill", "City of Terrors" and "Sewers of Oblivion".

His editors believed that a 175,000 word book was too long for an unknown author and that the story wasn't particularly engaging.

[2]: 124  Stackpole also wrote a trilogy of novels published in 1992, which were based on the Dark Conspiracy roleplaying game by GDW.

[2]: 60 Stackpole has found his greatest success in serial works that continue the characters and plot lines developed by other authors.

In 1987 he began writing novels set in the BattleTech universe for FASA Corporation, some of which were used as the source for a television animated series.

In the foreword to his book Outbound Flight, Timothy Zahn thanks Stackpole and issues a challenge at Star Wars Trivial Pursuit.

[5] Stackpole contributed one of the four stories in Roger Zelazny's shared world anthology Forever After, published by Baen Books in 1995.

At New York Comic Con 2012, it was revealed that Blizzard Entertainment had approached Stackpole to write the next novel in their series based on the popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft.

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