William B. Fawcett (born May 13, 1947)[1] is an American editor, anthologist, game designer, book packager, fiction writer, and historian.
Fawcett and fellow science fiction writer Jody Lynn Nye were married in 1987. They first 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.[2]
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.[3]: 166 Darwin Bromley brought Fawcett on as a partner in Mayfair Games soon after the company was formed in 1980, and they worked together to design the game Empire Builder (1980).[3]: 166 As a veteran role-playing gamer, Fawcett got Mayfair involved in the RPG field, and the company kicked off its Role Aids line with Beastmaker Mountain (1982).[3]: 166 Fawcett was friends with Robert Asprin and Lynn Abbey, and FASA was able to leverage their connection with Mayfair to obtain a license to publish Thieves' World role-playing game adventures from 1982–1984.[3]: 120, 167 Fawcett and Jordan Weisman designed the robot arena fighting game Combots (1983) for FASA.[3]: 121
Fawcett produced the Crossroads books (1987–1988), a series of licensed gamebooks published by Tor.[3]: 168 He also authored the short-lived SwordQuest gamebooks series.[4] He edited the book The War Years 1: The Far Stars War (1990).[5] With David Drake, he co-edited The Fleet series (1988-1991), as well as its sequels, Battlestation, Book One (1992), and Battlestation, Book Two: Vanguard (1993).[6] As a book packager, Fawcett was able to arrange a publishing deal between Wizards of the Coast and HarperCollins for novels set in the Magic: The Gathering multiverse of Dominia; the first novel in this series was Arena (1994).[3]: 278
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.[7]
Fawcett and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro write mystery novels together under the pen name Quinn Fawcett.[8] 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.[8]