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.

Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marine Academy and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests.

In 1980, Weisman founded role playing game publisher FASA Corporation (short for the Freedonia Aeronautics & Space Administration, named after the fictional country in the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup) with partner L. Ross Babcock. Weisman and Babcock printed up a few hundred copies of Weisman's early adventures for the pen and paper role-playing game, Traveller, and sold them to a local Chicago store before sending them to nationwide distributors. Although working out of Weisman's basement, he and Babcock were looking for outside talent and brought William H. Keith, Jr. and his brother J. Andrew Keith into the company from GDW. The company's first professional publication was I.S.P.M.V Tethys (1980), a set of deckplans for a mercenary transport, drawn by Weisman and featuring three scenarios written by Andrew Keith. In August 1981, FASA came to an agreement to publish the digest-sized magazine High Passage, on which Weisman and Babcock did the layout and editing. Weisman wanted FASA to produce its own science-fiction roleplaying game, so he and Babcock secured the rights to produce their own 1983 Star Trek: The Role Playing Game. FASA introduced a game about battling mechanoids called Combots (1983), by Weisman and Fawcett. FASA later produced the successful BattleTech and Shadowrun franchises.

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