James Herbert Brennan

James Herbert Brennan (Gilford, Northern Ireland, 5 July 1940 – Tullow, 1 January 2024) was an Irish writer in English and the author of more than a hundred books for adults, teenagers and children, along with several role-playing games. He published under the names Herbie Brennan and J.H. Brennan, and his output ranged from the occult to children's adventure, which is why he reached very different readers.

The son of grocers, he developed an early interest in mysticism that stayed with him throughout his life. At eighteen he became a journalist at the Belfast Telegraph, and in the 1960s he moved to Dublin to edit a weekly called Scene. While offering spiritual counselling and hypnotherapy, he turned to writing, and his first book, Astral Doorways, came out with HarperCollins in 1980.

His path into role-playing began with a fascination for Dungeons & Dragons. A Roman-themed game he started designing grew into a project covering myth and history from 4000 BCE to 400 CE, which became Man, Myth & Magic (1982). Game historians have counted it among the earliest RPGs to treat history seriously. Soon after came Grailquest, inspired by the gamebook format, in which a boy named Pip receives quests from Merlin. Its eight volumes sold around 6.5 million copies.

His 2003 novel Faerie Wars was a major hit with young readers and launched a five-book series that sold about 7.5 million copies. His other work covered history, parapsychology, self-improvement and romance, as well as the controversial Martian Genesis (1998), which argued that humanity has extraterrestrial origins. In 2019 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which greatly reduced his daily writing.

His legacy rests largely on his children's and young adult books, translated into roughly fifty languages, and on his early role in historically minded role-playing games.