Biography
Marc Gascoigne co-wrote Games Workshop's original Judge Dredd Roleplaying Game and Puffin's mass-market Advanced Fighting Fantasy trilogy. Gascoigne also published Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. He has also written and edited for Chaosium, West End Games, and FASA.
Gascoigne was the developer or editor of several of GW's classic boardgames in the mid-1980s, including the first two editions of Blood Bowl, and created the background for Dark Future, ported onto the car-based boardgame after the cancellation of an original cyberpunk-themed roleplaying game.
Although he worked on the popular children's series Fighting Fantasy as an editor, he only ever published one gamebook as author, which was called Battleblade Warrior (1988). It was number 31 of 59 in the original series and was released in early 1988. However, he also wrote two related novels, and five books under the Advanced Fighting Fantasy banner, including Titan (1986), an encyclopedia of the fictional world in which most of the gamebooks are set. He edited issues 10 to 13 of Warlock, the FF magazine, in 1986.
After ten years as a freelance editor, he returned to Games Workshop in 1997 to help establish the Black Library fiction imprint. Starting as editor he became publisher and overall manager of the BL Publishing family of imprints, that during a time also included Black Industries and Solaris Books.
Gascoigne, with Rick Priestley and Andy Jones of Warhammer, developed the idea for the Black Library which produced the magazine Inferno! as a result beginning in July 1997. Gascoigne was the general manager of Games Workshop's BL Publishing division, making books, board games, and RPGs.
He left this post at the end of March 2008 when Games Workshop downsized its staff. It was announced on 11th Sept 2008 that he had joined HarperCollins to create a new science fiction & fantasy imprint to be called Angry Robot.
Angry Robot was acquired by Osprey Publishing in September 2010. In October 2011, Gascoigne won the World Fantasy Special Award—Professional for Angry Robot, presented at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, California. In 2014 Angry Robot was sold by Osprey to Watkins Media. In 2016 Gascoigne won the British Fantasy Award in the category Best Independent Press, again for Angry Robot.
In 2019 Gascoigne was hired to launch a new imprint, Aconyte Books, for Asmodee Entertainment Ltd.