Fantasy Productions

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Fantasy Productions (often abbreviated FanPro) is pair of game and publishing companies from Germany and the USA. Owned and managed by essentially the same people, they are generally perceived as a single entity but legally they are in fact two distinct firms:

FanPro Germany

The Fantasy Productions GmbH, based in Düsseldorf and later Erkrath, Germany, was founded in 1983 by Ulrich Kiesow, Werner Fuchs and Hans-Joachim Alpers to produce small tin miniature figures. Kiesow also created the massively popular and successful German fantasy role-playing game Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye), which was published in cooperation with Schmidt Spiele (Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit GmbH) and Droemer Knaur publishing house. Kiesow's editorial work was organized at FanPro, which evolved into a major German publisher of role playing games and fantasy books.

Under license from FASA Corporation, FanPro produced the German-language edition of BattleTech from 1988 onwards. Notably, FanPro did not merely produce translated material, but re-organized it to some extent such as switching the introductory short story from CityTech ("Life in the Big City") for another story ("Black Cats cross your path" from the Shrapnel anthology) and even re-compiled content such as combining the five original sourcebooks on the Great Houses into a single, edited volume (Mächte der Inneren Sphäre). They also began to add original material early on, such as including additional scenarios in their translations of various scenario packs, and produced at least one sourcebook (Ronin!) with completely original content.

FanPro also produced the German version of Shadowrun, FASA's other highly successful game. Following the bankruptcy of Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit GmbH in 1997, they published Das Schwarze Auge in-house.

As of 2004, FanPro was reported to have 12 employees, plus a large number of freelance authors.

In 2007 the company reduced itself to its book publishing division (formerly their Phoenix imprint), after their BattleTech and Shadowrun licenses ran out in that year and were not renewed; the rights to Das Schwarze Auge were sold to Ulisses Spiele. WizKids, owner of the BattleTech IP, licensed the rights to InMediaRes instead who proceeded to market the game through their Catalyst Game Labs imprint. FanPro continued its novel series for Das Schwarze Auge, but subsequently had a disagreement with Catalyst over wheter or not they had retained the right to publish new German-language BattleTech and Shadowrun novels (which Catalyst denied). Several German-language BattleTech novels were published which have not been translated into English to date; since 2008, FanPro ceased to publications for BattleTech and Shadowrun.

They now operate as Fantasy Productions Verlags- und Medienvertriebsgesellschaft mbH.

FanPro USA

When FASA unexpectedly withdrew from the market in 2001, the owners of FanPro set up a sister company, Fantasy Productions LLC, in Chicago, although most of its employees worked remotely. FanPro LLC initially licensed the rights to produce English-language Shadowrun books in early 2001 from WizKids who had obtained the licensing rights from FASA, and by the summer of 2001 FanPro LLC had also signed an agreement to publish what was now known as Classic BattleTech in English. The staff of authors that went to work for FanPro was largely identical to the people who had previously worked for FASA, so the transition was seamless.

Interestingly, all English material published by FanPro also bears the WizKids logo and is copyrighted to WizKids instead of FanPro.

From 2001 to 2005, FanPro LLC released over a dozen original Shadowrun titles and reprinted core titles that FASA had originally released. They continued to release new Classic BattleTech books in English, and in 2006 released Total Warfare, the first in a series of revised full-color books for Classic BattleTech. FanPro GmbH continued to translate these books into German, along with German-only Shadowrun books. FanPro LLC also published The Dark Eye, an English translation of Das Schwarze Auge.

FanPro LLC alledgedly lost a significant amount of money when their distributor Fast Forward Entertainment (FFE), through whom all their income was funneled, collapsed; FFE is said to have grown too rapidly and hired employees with FanPro's money while creating an "accounting mess" through poor bookeeping that made it impossible to find out just how much of FanPro's money they had actually spent. This, combined with business decisions by the FanPro owners that benefitted FanPro Germany to the detriment of FanPro US, spelled doom for FanPro US. The FanPro US staff made an attempt to buy the company out, but the owner refused. Subsequently, the staff all quit and then went to work for Catalyst who had acquired the licenses.

External links

• German FanPro website

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