Troy Denning is an American fantasy and science fiction author and game designer who has written more than two dozen novels. Background Denning grew up in the mountain town of Idaho Springs, Colorado. An avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, he began writing himself at the age of fourteen in 80-page spiral-bound notebooks, and began to collect the usual quantity of rejection slips. Around his eighteenth birthday, he received a rejection slip from editor Ben Bova, but one with a signature and a handwritten note thanking him for the submission. Heartened, Denning continued to write as he attended Beloit College, where he also played on their Division III football team. Career Denning joined TSR as a game designer in 1981, and was promoted a year later to Manager of Designers, before he moved to the book department. Denning then worked for two years managing the Pacesetter game company. Denning designed the adventure board game Chill: Black Morn Manor (1985) for Pacesetter. When Mayfair Games picked up ownership of the horror game Chill from Pacesetter, Denning also moved to Mayfair at that time; Denning worked with Mayfair staffers David Ladyman, Jeff Leason and Louis Prosperi, to create a second edition of Chill (1990). After his stint at Mayfair Games, Denning went freelance. Denning wrote the third novel in TSRs "Avatar Trilogy", Waterdeep (1989), which he wrote under the house pseudonym Richard Awlinson; the book became a New York Times bestselling novel. He wrote the novel with Scott Ciencin, and the choice of the surname Awlinson was an inside joke which sounds like "all in one". In October 1989 he rejoined TSR as a senior designer, co-creating the Dark Sun setting with Tim Brown and Mary Kirchoff. Denning and Brown led the project, alongside fiction editor Kirchoff, and they were soon joined by artist Brom, who contributed the unique illustrations that helped set Dark Sun apart from the other TSR settings, making Dark Sun the first of TSR's world designs with a more artistic sensibility. According to Denning, the three designers envisioned "a world for experienced DMs that would push the AD&D game to its limits and let people do things like play half-giants and thri-kreen and superstrong characters—in short, all the really neat stuff we wanted to do ourselves, but that everybody kept saying would ruin game balance." Denning felt in 1998 that Dark Sun "did what we wanted it