The Austin Laboratory

In the summer of 1981, a twenty-year-old Texan who’d dropped out of UT Austin after one semester of journalism sat down with a newly published superhero RPG called Champions and started running a campaign. He’d been a reporter at the Austin American-Statesman for about a year. He was already editing Space Gamer magazine for Steve Jackson Games, reviewing the flood of RPGs pouring off small presses in the post-D&D gold rush. He had read hundreds of game manuscripts. He knew what was out there.

The campaign would run for twenty-two years. Two hundred and sixty sessions. Forty-eight players rotating through. Six thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight documents archived. It became the laboratory where Aaron Allston worked out every idea that mattered.

Austin in 1981 was one of the hobby’s great creative hubs. Steve Jackson operated from there. Warren Spector, who would later create Deus Ex, was in the community. Denis Loubet illustrated and played in the campaign. Michael Stackpole co-designed games with Allston and later recruited him for Star Wars novels. The scene was small, competitive, experimental—a garage-band moment for game design, and Allston was the kid who kept meticulous notes about every rehearsal.

The Blue Notebook

The problem was simple: a large group of superhero players sitting around one table. Half of them had personal storylines—romances, secret identities, private vendettas—that couldn’t play out in front of everyone else. Resolving those arcs at the table meant the rest of the group sat idle. Skipping them meant the characters stayed flat.

Allston’s solution was a blue examination notebook. Between sessions, players wrote scenes with the GM in these notebooks—solo investigations, character development, secret plotting. The practice started as “paranoia notes,” the kind of secret messages GMs had passed since the hobby began. Allston transformed the temporary communication tool into a persistent narrative journal. He formalized it. Gave it structure. Published it.

When Strike Force appeared in 1988, blue-booking became a term of art. Ross Watson, who went on to lead development on Warhammer 40K Roleplay, wrote that he learned the technique from that book. Steve Kenson, creator of Mutants & Masterminds, expanded the blue-booking section for the posthumous 2016 revision. Justin Alexander, one of the hobby’s most prominent critics, called Strike Force “a revolutionary text” and credited it as the origin point.

The blue notebook presaged everything. Play-by-email. Play-by-post. The Discord side-channel. Every time a player today conducts a private scene with their GM between sessions, they’re practicing a technique Allston named and codified thirty-seven years ago. Most of them have never heard of Strike Force.

The Campaign as Organism

Blue-booking was only one piece. Strike Force contained thirteen pages of campaign advice that became, per working designers, some of the highest-value-per-page output in RPG publishing history. Allston treated the campaign as a living system requiring active management. He classified thirteen player archetypes—the Builder, the Combat Monster, the Romantic, the Tragedian—and provided GMs with strategies for keeping each type engaged. He formalized pre-campaign communication about expectations, themes, and ground rules: what the hobby now calls Session Zero.

Glen Blacow had published a player-type framework in Different Worlds magazine earlier in the decade, and Allston built on that foundation. His contribution was making the categories vivid, practical, and actionable—a field guide rather than an academic taxonomy. The influence chain is documented: Allston’s player types informed Robin D. Laws’ Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering (2002), which became the industry-standard reference, which fed into the D&D 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide (2008), which flows into the 2024 DMG’s player motivation tools. Thirty-six years of propagation. Allston is rarely cited in the later links.

Christopher Helton’s EN World comparison became the defining metaphor: Strike Force was the Velvet Underground & Nico of RPG supplements. Commercially limited. Disproportionately influential among practitioners. Every reader went on to become a GM, and a lot of them went on to make their own games.

The Kit

In 1989, TSR published The Complete Fighter’s Handbook, the first in the AD&D 2nd Edition “Complete” series. Allston was sole credited author. The book introduced a structural innovation that would define the edition and reshape character creation for the next three decades: the Kit.

The problem was class rigidity. AD&D had a handful of base classes. Players wanted their fighter to feel different from every other fighter at the table. The old solution was creating more classes—a path that led to hundreds of specialized character types, each requiring its own rules. Allston’s solution was modular. A Kit was a layer of flavor and mechanics—special benefits, specific hindrances, narrative identity—applied on top of a base class. The Swashbuckler. The Cavalier. The Savage. Same fighter chassis, different personality, different tools.

The lineage is clear to anyone who reads RPG history. Kits evolved into 3rd Edition’s Prestige Classes. Prestige Classes evolved into 5th Edition’s Subclasses. The fundamental insight—that character customization works best as a modular layer on a stable base—is now the default architecture of the world’s most popular RPG. It runs so deep that nobody thinks to trace it back to a freelancer in Austin writing the first supplement in a series.

The Compiler’s Art

The D&D Rules Cyclopedia (1991) is the work people mention first when they hear Allston’s name. It is also the work that requires the most careful attribution.

By 1991, “Basic” D&D had fragmented across five boxed sets—Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortals—written primarily by Frank Mentzer. The transition from one tier to the next often felt like switching games. Mathematical scaling shifted. Administrative overhead multiplied. The system that was supposed to take characters from level 1 to level 36 couldn’t do it without grinding gears at every transition point.

Allston compiled the entire thing into a single 304-page hardcover. He standardized saving throw progressions, integrated the Weapon Mastery and General Skills subsystems that had accumulated across Gazetteer supplements, rewrote explanatory text, and imposed organizational clarity on a decade of accumulated rules. Rick Swan’s Dragon Magazine review called it “a stunningly comprehensive volume” and observed that Allston “must’ve been genetically engineered to write RPG rules.”

The credits page reads: “Rules Compilation and Development: Aaron Allston.” The core rules were Mentzer’s. The underlying game mechanics were Mentzer’s. Shannon Appelcline specifies the two most notable creators as Mentzer for the original boxes and Allston for leading the compilation project. This was developmental work of exceptional quality—arguably the finest compilation in RPG history—but it was not original game design. The Cyclopedia sold 93,252 copies between 1991 and 1996 and currently holds Adamantine rank on DriveThruRPG, the platform’s highest tier. It is a touchstone of the Old School Renaissance. The architecture it preserves belongs to Mentzer. The form it takes belongs to Allston.

The Father of Mystara

While the Cyclopedia compiled someone else’s system, Allston’s worldbuilding for the Known World setting—later renamed Mystara—was wholly his own.

GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos (1987) established the template for the entire Gazetteer series. Allston said he “liked the challenge of creating the template for Gazetteers to follow” and that it required “a lot of thinking about the sort of information that DMs needed.” GAZ6: The Dwarves of Rockhome followed. Then the massive boxed sets: Dawn of the Emperors, Hollow World, Wrath of the Immortals. The fan community at Pandius.com, which has maintained active Mystara content for decades, calls him the “Father of Mystara” and states that no other writer developed the setting as much as Allston did.

The methodology evaluates mechanical contribution over setting work, and Allston’s Mystara output is primarily worldbuilding rather than system innovation. But the Hollow World box set and Wrath of the Immortals both required integrating new rules for their specific contexts—the anti-magic shell of the Hollow World, the domain and immortal play of Wrath. These weren’t just setting books. They were campaign frameworks with mechanical teeth.

The Genre Philosopher

Champions 5th Edition (2002) was Allston’s return to the superhero genre after a decade dominated by fiction writing. He was sole author of what reviewers called the most thorough look at the superhero genre for gaming ever created. The genre analysis sections—Golden Age through Modern Age, with mechanical frameworks for each—were praised as valuable even for people running completely different systems.

The book also demonstrated the primary structural weakness in Allston’s late work: density. Nearly 400 pages of internally consistent rules earned Champions 5E the nickname “the Big Black Book” and drew criticism for an overwhelming barrier to entry. The internal consistency came at the cost of accessibility—a trade-off Allston’s earlier, leaner work had avoided. His house rules from the Strike Force campaign had already been folded into Champions 4th Edition, as James Davis Nicoll documented, creating a direct pipeline from Allston’s personal play to the official Hero System canon.

By this point Allston had written fourteen Star Wars novels, multiple reaching the New York Times bestseller list. He’d brought his tabletop “squad-building” philosophy to the Wraith Squadron series, recommended for the gig by Stackpole. Game design became intermittent. Champions 6th Edition (2010), co-authored with Steven S. Long, and the Paranoia GM Pack (2004) were late-career contributions that maintained connection to the hobby without advancing it. He died of heart failure on February 27, 2014, while arriving as Guest of Honor at VisionCon. He was fifty-three.

The Invisible Infrastructure

Allston’s innovations share a peculiar quality: they worked so well that they disappeared.

Blue-booking became how players conduct private scenes. Session Zero became how campaigns begin. Player-type awareness became how GMs think about their tables. Modular character customization became how D&D works. Nobody credits the water main when they turn on the tap. Allston built metagame infrastructure—tools for managing the experience of play rather than simulating the fiction of play—and the tools became invisible precisely because they became universal.

Shannon Appelcline, author of the definitive RPG industry history Designers & Dragons, wrote that Allston “influenced me the most personally, because he archived the history of the industry at his height—creating annals that I later plundered for my own work.” Chris Avellone, designer of Planescape: Torment and Fallout: New Vegas, called Strike Force “one of the best RPG supplements ever” and said it “deserves to be restored for a new generation.” Steve Jackson said simply: “He’s the best gamemaster I’ve ever known.”

Two years after his death, a Kickstarter for the revised Strike Force funded in four days. Steve Kenson, Sean Patrick Fannon, and Michael Surbrook expanded Allston’s text with character write-ups for Mutants & Masterminds, ICONS, and Savage Worlds—three major superhero systems demonstrating cross-system relevance thirty years after the original publication.

The Honest Assessment

The draft presents Allston cleanly, and the two-part analysis is more consistent than most submissions to this project. The main inflation is tonal rather than factual—no fabricated career phases or false titles. One concrete discrepancy: Part 2 lists Paranoia XP (2004) as a co-design credit for the full game. Part 1 correctly identifies this as authorship of the Paranoia GM Pack, a supplement. The core Paranoia XP was Allen Varney’s project. The draft also claims Allston’s “Hunted” mechanic influenced Powered by the Apocalypse “Fronts”—a connection with no sourced evidence in either draft or the broader record.

The critical attribution question is the Rules Cyclopedia, and both parts handle it honestly. Allston was compiler and developer. Mentzer wrote the rules. The Cyclopedia’s propagation through the OSR movement belongs to Mentzer’s system, not Allston’s compilation. What does belong to Allston: the organizational clarity, the writing quality, and the integration of scattered supplement material into a coherent whole. That’s Mastery, not Invention or Architecture.

The scoring is straightforward once you separate what Allston invented from what he compiled, and what propagated from his original work versus what propagated from systems he polished for others.

The Scoring Case

The Hidden Pattern

Every designer on this list built games. Allston built the management layer that sits above the game.

His contemporaries designed physics engines—how swords hit, how spells resolve, how damage accumulates. Allston designed the operating system: how forty-eight players rotate through a twenty-two-year campaign without the narrative collapsing. How a GM tracks personal antagonists across hundreds of sessions. How players develop characters between sessions without stalling the table. How a base class supports infinite variation without infinite complexity.

He was a systems thinker who happened to work in games. His journalism training shows in the organizational clarity. His editorial experience shows in the economy of his prose. His decades of personal GMing show in the relentless focus on what actually happens at the table, session after session, year after year.

The methodology scores systems over settings, and Allston’s systems are metagame infrastructure—tools for managing the experience of play. That’s harder to see than a dice mechanic or a character sheet. It’s also harder to live without.

What Remains

The blue notebook. The Kit. The Session Zero conversation. The player-type field guide. The Cyclopedia that put an entire game in one book. The Mystara that fans still build on thirty years later. The twenty-two-year campaign that proved RPGs could be a legitimate form of long-form collaborative storytelling.

Allston said it clearly: “A role-playing game or adventure is a textbook. It doesn’t have to be a dry, boring textbook, but any way you look at it, it’s an instruction manual.” He wrote instruction manuals that taught a generation of GMs how to run campaigns that lasted. The instructions were so good they became invisible—absorbed into the craft itself, practiced by thousands who never learned the teacher’s name.

He died at fifty-three, arriving as Guest of Honor at a convention. Steve Jackson called him the best gamemaster he’d ever known. The Pandius community calls him the Father of Mystara. Christopher Helton compared him to the Velvet Underground. The methodology calls him a 29.

Total: 29 points. Year: 1983.

Total: 29 points. Year: 1983.