Name Bill Fawcett | Role Author | |
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Books How To Lose a Battle, It Seemed Like a Good Ide, Hunters & Shooters, Oval Office Oddities, 100 Mistakes that Chan Similar People | ||
William Fawcett is an American editor, anthologist, game designer, book packager, author, and historian.
Contents
Fawcett is married to Jody Lynn Nye.
Career
Bill Fawcett was one of the players in early Dungeons & Dragons games being played in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, using photocopied prototypes of the rules handed out by Gary Gygax. Darwin Bromley brought Fawcett on as a partner in Mayfair Games soon after the company was formed in 1980, and together they designed the game Empire Builder (1980). As a veteran role-playing gamer, Fawcett decided to get Mayfair into the RPG field, and the company kicked off its Role Aids game line with Beastmaker Mountain (1982). As a result of their connections with Mayfair, FASA was able to get a license to publish adventures (1982–1984) for Chaosium's Thieves' World role-playing game thanks to Fawcett's friendships with Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey. Fawcett and Jordan Weisman designed the robot arena fighting game Combots (1983) for FASA.
Fawcett produced the Crossroads books (1987–1988), a set of licensed gamebooks published by Tor. He edited the book The War Years 1: The Far Stars War (1990). With David Drake, he co-edited Battlestation, Book One (1992), and Battlestation, Book Two: Vanguard (1993). As a book packager, Fawcett arranged a deal between Wizards of the Coast and HarperCollins to publish novels set in Magic's multiverse of Dominia; the first of these was Arena (1994).
His 2008 book, Oval Office Oddities, was described as "Chock-full of information—trivia, anecdotes, charts, illustrations, etc." focusing on the lives of American presidents and their wives.
Works
Fawcett and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro write mystery novels together under the pen name Quinn Fawcett. Fawcett was also a field historian for the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, and has co-authored work on the US Navy Seals in Vietnam.
As writer
Mistakes in History series
As editor
Personal life
Fawcett and fellow science fiction writer Jody Lynn Nye were married in 1987. They met at a science fiction convention in 1985. At that time, Fawcett owned a gaming company in Niles, Illinois, and Nye began to work as a freelance writer for the company.