Allston was born December 8, 1960, in Corsicana, Texas, to Tom Dale Allston and Rose Binford Boehm. Allston moved all over Texas in his youth and graduated from high school in Denton. An avid fan of science fiction from an early age, by high school he was the secretary and reporter for his high school science fiction club. Allston moved to Austin in 1979 and attended the University of Texas.
Allston was a circulation manager, assistant Editor, and Editor of Space Gamer magazine, and by 1983 was a full-time freelance game designer. He served as Editor of Space Gamer from issues 52 (June 1982) to 65 (September/October 1983), and as Editor of Fantasy Gamer for the first issue (August/September 1983) and co-editor of the second issue (December/January 1984). During Allston's tenure as Editor, the magazine won the H.G. Wells Award for Best Professional Role-Playing Magazine in 1982. Allston authored the book Autoduel Champions in 1983, which crossed over Champions by Hero Games and Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games. Allston helped launch the Fantasy Gamer spinoff magazine. He co-wrote the computer game Savage Empire, which was named Best PC Fantasy RPG by Game Player magazine in 1990. He authored the Rules Cyclopedia (1991), a revision and compilation for the Dungeons & Dragons game. He branched into fiction, and in the mid-1990s wrote five novels.
He began writing for the Star Wars X-Wing series in 1997, when the primary sequence Writer Michael Stackpole could not handle the entire workload. Allston produced a new edition of Champions for Hero Games in 2002. In 2006, he launched The Legacy of the Force series with a hardcover entitled Betrayal.
In 2005, Allston made his directorial debut on the independent film Deadbacks, which he also wrote and produced. The film went into post-production but was never released.
In early April 2009 Allston had a heart attack and underwent an emergency quadruple bypass surgery, while on the book signing tour for Outcast, the first book in the Fate of the Jedi series.
