Aaron Allston

• 1. Introduction

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  Aaron Dale Allston was born on the 8th of December 1960 in Corsicana, Texas, and by the time he died on the 27th of February 2014, he had shaped two worlds that rarely overlapped: the world of tabletop role-playing games and the universe of Star Wars novels. He collapsed during an appearance at VisionCon in Branson, Missouri, apparently from heart failure, and died later that day in Springfield at the age of 53. The questions that linger are worth sitting with. How does a teenager in Denton, Texas become the person who helps define Dungeons and Dragons lore for a generation? And how does a game designer make the leap to writing some of the most beloved Star Wars fiction of the late 1990s and 2000s? The answers stretch from a high school science fiction club to the halls of TSR, from the cockpits of X-Wing starfighters to a book-signing tour that ended in a hospital.

• 2. Texas Roots and Early Passion

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  Allston grew up moving all over Texas, the son of Tom Dale Allston and Rose Binford Boehm. By high school in Denton, he was already the secretary and reporter for his school's science fiction club, a formal role that signals just how seriously he took the genre from an early age. In 1979 he moved to Austin and attended the University of Texas. That Austin connection would persist: he later worked briefly for the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, and Round Rock, Texas became his permanent home.

• 3. Editor, Designer, and Pioneer

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  By 1983, Allston had worked his way from circulation manager to assistant editor to full-time freelance game designer. His editorial tenure at Space Gamer ran from issue 52 in June 1982 through issue 65 in September and October 1983, and under his stewardship the magazine won the H.G. Wells Award for Best Professional Role-Playing Magazine in 1982. He also served as editor of Fantasy Gamer for its first issue in August and September 1983, and co-editor of the second issue in December and January 1984. The spinoff magazine Fantasy Gamer itself was something he helped launch. That same year of 1983 he authored Autoduel Champions, a crossover book blending Champions by Hero Games with Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games.

• 4. Shaping Dungeons and Dragons

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  Allston's role-playing game work reached its most enduring form through his contributions to TSR's Dungeons and Dragons. Several of his game supplements helped establish the foundations for Mystara, the D&D campaign setting that would underpin subsequent TSR product lines. His 1987 work GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was among the titles that built out that world. He also co-wrote the computer game Savage Empire, which Game Player magazine named the Best PC Fantasy RPG in 1990. His 1991 Rules Cyclopedia was a revision and compilation for the core Dungeons and Dragons game, gathering and unifying the rules into a single reference volume. He also wrote the Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia supplement in 1989, and the Wrath of the Immortals boxed set in 1992, both of which extended the Mystara line.

• 5. Into the Star Wars Universe

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  In 1997, Allston entered the Star Wars X-Wing novel series when the primary sequence writer Michael Stackpole could not handle the entire workload. Allston's first entries in that series were Wraith Squadron and Iron Fist, both published in 1998, followed by Solo Command in 1999 and Starfighters of Adumar the same year. Mercy Kill, his return to the X-Wing line, came out in 2012. He also wrote two entries in the New Jedi Order series, Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream and Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand, both in 2002. In 2006 he launched the Legacy of the Force series with a hardcover entitled Betrayal, and he contributed two more novels to that nine-book run: Exile in 2007 and Fury in 2007. His three contributions to the nine-book Fate of the Jedi series were Outcast in 2009, Backlash in 2010, and Conviction in 2011.

• 6. Health, Film, and Final Years

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  In early April 2009, while on the book-signing tour for Outcast, Allston suffered a heart attack and underwent emergency quadruple bypass surgery. The timing was stark: the tour was for the very first book in the Fate of the Jedi series, a series he would go on to contribute two more novels to despite the medical crisis. Years before that, in 2005, he had made his directorial debut on an independent film called Deadbacks, which he also wrote and produced. The film went into post-production but was never released. He also produced a new edition of Champions for Hero Games in 2002, and in 2013 a short story he contributed appeared in A Hero by Any Other Name, an anthology edited by Jean Rabe. His bibliography of stand-alone fiction includes titles going back to Web of Danger in 1988.