Terry K. Amthor

Terry K. Amthor
Amthor in Santorini, Greece
Born	Terry Kevin Amthor (1958-10-18) October 18, 1958 (age 59) Chicago, Illinois
Residence	Charlottesville, Virginia
Education	University of Virginia, B.S., Architecture
Occupation	Game designer, Author
Website	www.eidolonstudio.com

Terry K. Amthor (born October 18, 1958) is an American game designer who has worked primarily on role-playing games, and as a fantasy author.

Terry Kevin Amthor was born in Chicago, IL, but soon moved to Manitowoc, WI, and then at the age of six to Bethel Park, PA. He later attended Bethel Park High School. He was also the fiction editor of the school literary magazine Vernissage and a member of the ironically-named physics and science enthusiasts club the Flat Earth Society.

He attended the University of Virginia School of Architecture in 1976. It was at UVa that he first discovered D&D through a gaming group led by Pete Fenlon, who was running a campaign set in Middle-earth. While at UVa, he took a number of classes in architectural history, focusing on Greek, Roman, and Pre-Columbian architecture. He also took graduate-level classes in advanced mathematics and art history. Amthor went on to graduate in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Design, while maintaining his close associations with the Fenlon group throughout his college years. This association led to his participation in the founding of Iron Crown Enterprises.

Amthor's first published work was a Star Wars parody, "Raker Wars," for the University of Virginia weekly paper The Declaration.

Though Iron Crown Enterprises was founded and incorporated in 1980, initially it could afford few full-time employees. From 1980 to 1982, Terry Amthor worked at UVa's Fiske-Kimball Fine Arts Library and what was known then as the Sci-Tech Library Engineering and Science Library, serving in the bibliography departments of both libraries, and also contributing to the initial Library of Congress conversion from a card catalog to an online catalog, via OCLC.