A few months into 1987 (surprisingly I can’t remember the exact month), I biked over to Desert Hobbies in Tempe AZ (long since defunct) to see if there were any new release for BattleTech. I had the 2nd Edition Box Set, CityTech, Technical Readout: 3025, Fox’s Teeth and Tales of the Black Widow Company. What would the next thing be? I was excited! Much to my shock that next thing I found was a novel: Decision At Thunder Rift.

What, a novel? For a universe I was already rapidly falling in love with? No…way…dude (said in a drawling, 15-year-old’s 80′s-style voice). I devoured the thing almost in one sitting…and well…I’ve pretty much devoured every novel since.

For Shadowrun, it was a significantly different experience, but no less impactful for its lasting measure of my enjoyment of the universe. The big exposure to those novels came when I started working at FASA Corporation in 1996. I wanted to be as helpful as I could to Mike Mulvihill (the then SR Line Developer), and so I borrowed 20 some SR novels from the FASA library and read one-a-night until I polished them off inside a month (didn’t have kids yet, so I could do that sort of stupidly-awesome marathon sprint).

Personally, professionally, in every way you can name, the BattleTech and Shadowrun novels have been woven indelibly into my life. And I’ve talked and read and discussed at endless game nights and cons with so many of you…the same applies to tens of thousands of people all over the globe.

For those that have been following us for a good long time, you might remember that three years ago we were in the process of releasing into epub the entire back catalog of BattleTech and Shadowrun novels when we had to pull them down at the request of our licensor. Three long, long years of work and negotiationsand we just posted an announcement surrounding the return of these fantastic stories, rebranded as Legends. (Monster kudos to Loren Coleman for never giving up and for dealing with piles of legalities that makes my skin crawl; Blaine Pardoe for the crack in the armor; Matt Heerdt for Herculean cracking of old files and endless epub generation; Aaron Cahall for crazy reviewing and reformatting of some of the truly ancient files; David Kerber for a pile of cover graphic layouts.)

In additional to Alex Iglesias brilliant re-imagined Double-Blind cover above, we’ve got Victor Moreno slaying it with his re-imagined Shadowrun Secrets of Power Trilogy, as well as some additional new art and some great art pulled from the archives for our initial launch titles.

So whether you’re brand new, coming back after a hiatus, or just looking for epubs to read on your e-reader of choice of books still on your shelf, it’s a brilliant time to leap in and grab these wonderfully, seminal action adventures!

Enjoy!

Randall