Allen Varney

Allen Varney
Allen Varney in 2006
Born	1958 (age 58–59) St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Genre	Role-playing games
Spouse	Beth Fischi

Allen Varney (born 1958) is an American writer and game designer. Varney has produced numerous books, role-playing game supplements, technical manuals, articles, reviews, columns, and stories, as well as the fantasy novel Cast of Fate (TSR, 1996). Since the 1990s, he has worked primarily in computer games.

Varney was born in St. Louis, Missouri and was raised by his mother, Marcelene Varney. He graduated from Reno High School in 1976 and has a dual B.A. in English and history from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Varney designed the pen & paper roleplaying game Necromancer (1983), which was published by Steve Jackson Games. Varney wrote Son of Toon (1986), the third supplement to the Toon RPG. From 1984 to 1986 he worked as Assistant Editor at Steve Jackson Games (with Warren Spector, then Editor-in-Chief) editing Space Gamer magazine.

Warren Spector and Varney wrote the supplement Send in the Clones (1985) for West End Games' Paranoia RPG. In 1986, he left Steve Jackson Games to freelance. From this time onward, he wrote a large body of game supplements for companies like TSR, Inc., FASA Corporation, West End Games, and White Wolf, Inc..

Varney did work for TSR from 1987 to 1992, including the "Blood Brethren" trilogy (Nightwail, Nightrage, Nightstorm) and Five Coins for a Kingdom, Wildspace for Spelljammer, Veiled Alliance for Dark Sun, and several gamebooks, the Ariya, Binsada, and Talinie realm packs for Birthright. He also edited modules for the Ravenloft, Planescape, and Forgotten Realms settings, and was a game reviewer and news columnist for Dragon magazine.