Bestselling fantasy and science fiction author Troy Denning was born in 1958. He has written many novels, including the Prism Pentad series and multiple contributions to the Star Wars and Forgotten Realms universes. Denning is one of the founders of the game company Pacesetter Ltd, and he co-designed the Dark Sun Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. He has published under his own name and the pseudonym Richard Awlinson. 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. He then worked for two years managing the Pacesetter game company, and had a stint at Mayfair Games. 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. In October 1989 he rejoined TSR as a senior designer, co-creating the Dark Sun setting with Tim Brown and Mary Kirchoff. Denning returned to freelance writing again in 1991, writing the bestselling "Prism Pentad" for the Dark Sun setting, and the Forgotten Realms "Twilight Giants" trilogy Denning also wrote the Planescape hardcover Pages of Pain "It had to be from the Lady of Pain's viewpoint which is something of a problem, since (as every Planescape player knows) she never speaks and (this was the really good part) the reader must know less about her at the end of the book than he does at the beginning, and nobody knows anything about her at the beginning. In 2010 Troy Denning published his book Vortex and it hit the New York Times Best Seller list.