L. Ross Babcock III is a

game designer Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Increasingly, elements and principles of game design are also applied to other interactions, in ...

who has worked primarily on role-playing games.

Career

When

Jordan Weisman Jordan Weisman is an American game designer, author, and serial entrepreneur who has founded five game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Biography Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, ...

asked his friends in 1980 if anyone else would join him in starting a company to print adventures and deckplans for '' Traveller'', and L. Ross Babcock III had the money and together they formed

FASA Fasa ( fa, فسا, Fasā, also Romanized as Fassa) is a city and capital of Fasa County, Fars Province, Iran. At the 2016 census, its population was 110,825, in 33,379 families. Fasa is the fourth most populous city of the province. The city date ...

. Weisman and Babcock printed up a few hundred copies of Weisman's early adventures, and sold them to a local Chicago store; shortly they began sending samples to distributors who were soon selling them to retailers nationwide. Babcock and Weisman knew of William H. Keith Jr. and Andrew Keith as freelancers who regularly wrote and drew for

Game Designers' Workshop Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) was a wargame and role-playing game publisher from 1973 to 1996. Many of their games are now carried by other publishers. History Game Designers' Workshop was originally established June 22, 1973. The founding m ...

, and their knowledge of GDW encouraged them to bring the Keith brothers into the company as their first recruits in 1980. In August 1981, FASA came to an agreement to publish the magazine ''High Passage'', for which Weisman and Babcock did layout and editing. Babcock helped design the role-playing game '' Behind Enemy Lines'' (1982). After obtaining the license to create a ''Star Trek'' role-playing game, Weisman and Babcock looked out-of-house for a ''Star Trek'' design team, and Fantasimulations Association ultimately created '' Star Trek: The Role Playing Game'' (1983) for FASA. When FASA Interactive became Microsoft's FASA Studio, both Babcock and Weisman went over to Microsoft. In early 2000, Babcock stepped up as the final president of FASA, overseeing the company as it was ready to get out of the tabletop publishing business. On January 25, 2001, Mort Weisman (father of Jordan) and Ross Babcock announced that FASA was closing down in an orderly way after producing a few final products.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Babcock, L. Ross III Living people Role-playing game designers Year of birth missing (living people)