Scott Bennie

Scott Bennie (1960 – March 29, 2022) was a writer and game designer who worked as a freelancer for TSR, Inc. during the 1980s and early 1990s, contributing to various Dungeons & Dragons settings, Dragon magazine, and others.

Career
After being introduced to RPGs at V-Con in Vancouver in 1977, Scott got interested in them in his senior high school years. He started submitting to Dragon, "on a whim" in his words. Following an editor's call for submissions on a bounty hunter NPC class, Bennie submitted his own and it was accepted and published in "Not a Very Nice Guy" in Dragon #52 in 1981, his first sale.

Bennie steadily became a regular freelancer for both Dragon and Dungeons & Dragons from 1983 to 1992, and authored, co-authored, and contributed to various sourcebooks and settings. Notably, he detailed monsters for Monstrous Compendium Volume One (orc to remorhaz) and Monstrous Compendium Volume Two (merman to myconid) and for the Forgotten Realms, he contributed the "Rumors of War" adventure to the Swords of the Iron Legion module in 1988 and wrote Old Empires in 1990, which introduced the Old Empires realms of Chessenta, Unther, and Mulhorand. On the development of Old Empires, he later wrote "It began, as this author recollects it with Ed Greenwood, the man who created Faerûn, with a few encounters between his adventurers and bald-headed priestesses of Set. Mulhorand was created by Ed as their land of origin. When TSR Inc. hired me in 1989 to write of those lands, I was told to base them on the ancient earth empires of Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. I did the work according to the specs I was given, though I twisted them to reflect their antiquity, whittled down the vast pantheons to reflect their decline. Old Empires was released in 1990, and was not, I am told, a good seller. Though it received virtually no feedback at the time, it remains a reasonably popular product with fans (though many have taken issue with its details and approach), and for that I'm grateful."

Meanwhile, Bennie also worked on many other RPGs, including Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Traveller, Marvel Superheroes, and particularly Champions, which he "fell in love with immediately" and became a prominent writer for. Although he graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Secondary Education from the University of British Columbia in 1986, Bennie was unable to make a career in teaching, and in 1989 a job offer from TSR fell through.

In 1990, Scott began work at Interplay Entertainment, switching to computer games and working on their Lord of the Rings series, the Star Trek games, and Fallout, among others. In this capacity, he returned to the Realms as a level designer for Descent to Undermountain in 1997.

After 2000, Bennie departed from Interplay, owing to health issues and industry decline, and returned to freelance RPG writing and teaching. Bennie had continued writing personally for the Old Empires of the Forgotten Realms, and in 2001 shared with fans a compilation of his unofficial additions and advancement, titled "Old Empires Prestige Classes, Spells, and Sundry", which took the area in a different direction to TSR's later development. "However, being a compulsive tinkerer, I just can't leave them alone, and there are details in Old Empires that I've never been entirely happy with, thus I've written this document to fill in a few holes." he said in his introduction.