Scott Hardie

Scott is the GM of Gothic Earth. He prepares each game session and runs the web site.

Scott has run or played in numerous RPGs over the years. The games that influenced Gothic Earth include:

1993-1996: Heroes Unlimited - Scott's first real RPG experience was running this superhero game by Palladium Books for high-school friends. Having started as a GM instead of as a player, Scott felt comfortable in the role of planner and storyteller, although he invited players to take turns running sessions if they were comfortable. The game was never regular, just played when they felt like it. Kelly Lee, Lori Lancaster, and Matthew Preston were among the players.

1997-2001: The World Game - Scott learned HTML during his freshman year of college in 1996. After a tabletop session of the Palladium Fantasy RPG with Matthew and another player fizzled out, Scott decided to adapt the game into HTML and run it on his web site. He wrote semi-daily installments of the story called posts, and invited players to write replies saying what their characters would do next. Posts were grouped into chapters, and the game was designed to have themes and character arcs that played out over time. Kelly, Lori, and Matthew all played the game over the years along with many other friends.

2001-2002: Gothic Earth - A group of friends in Illinois took turns running and playing various RPGs. One of the games in rotation was called "Gothic Earth" by its DM, Bill Valentin, but its published title was Masque of the Red Death, a Ravenloft setting that brought the horror elements of Ravenloft to the year 1892 but kept the Dungeons & Dragons rules. Scott played Giancarlo Bon Motto, an Italian antiquities merchant based in Philadelphia who opened a Boston store in the first adventure. Other players included Kelly as Katherine Bowgren, a rich safari hunter; Jon Batchelor as Eddie Nemulus, a cantrip master; and Jesse Newsom as Jack O'Bannon, a clever thief. Already a fan of late Victorian literature, Scott became enthralled with the world setting, and was sorry to see the game end abruptly when he and Kelly left for Florida in 2002. One of the other games in rotation was an anime-themed game run by Jon with the Big Eyes, Small Mouth rules.

2002-2004: The Weekly Curiosity - With a new group of players in Florida, minus Kelly who moved back to Illinois after two sessions, Scott ran a modern horror/adventure game about tabloid reporters working for an outlandish paper similar to the Weekly World News. Scott was impressed by the Big Eyes, Small Mouth rules and decided to use them for this campaign, adapting them for some house rules and revising them when Tri-Stat dX succeeded them. The characters began as mundane humans and spent points developing their characters with supernatural powers as the game proceeded, as an extraterrestrial energy had allowed them to transcend their human limits.

2003-2006: Fin du siécle - Unemployed and eager to recapture some of the magic of The World Game, Scott decided to run a new RPG on his web site using the same post-and-reply format. He borrowed the game setting of Bill's Gothic Earth game, but came up with very simplified rules for inexperienced players. The game was popular with the players, and Kelly created a character for it when she and Scott became a long-distance couple again, but Scott's demanding workload by 2006 meant that weeks began to go by between posts. Scott ended the game early, unsatisfied with the result and desiring more adventures in the game setting. Players included Matthew as Artemis Victor, a mechanic; Amir Sufyani as Rajeev Subram, an archeology student; Scott Baumann as Nigel Harrington, a British noble; Kris Weberg as Charles Collins, a reporter; Anna Gregoline as Uta Urzica, a fortune teller; Erik Bates as Sasha Mironov, a hitman turned photographer; Michael Paul Cote as Kerry Gilhoulie, a street urchin; and Jeremiah Poisson as Anya Anyanka, a Ravenloft resident trapped in this world. The group was led by John Edwards as Wo Jin, an antiquities merchant from New York's Chinatown who employed the others to travel with him, acquiring merchandise to sell.

2005: Abre los ojos - Scott's next attempt to run a tabletop game, featuring Aaron Shurtleff and other friends as players, went badly. It featured an extensive web site on Funeratic and an ambitious original rule system for its sci-fi time-travel setting, but Scott had agreed to begin the game before he had any adventures planned, and after only two sessions Scott had to call an early end to it due to lack of time to plan more. Embarrassed by this incident, Scott made up his mind first to take two years off from running games in order to clear his head, and second not to run another game until he had planned it for a long time and was sure it was stable. In 2007, Scott began planning Gothic Earth, deliberately re-using elements of these various past games to ensure success this time.