He was not only the name on one famous invention.

He was the person who kept complicated things moving.

Car Wars. Autoduel Quarterly. GURPS Horror. GURPS Autoduel. Pyramid. TSR books. Star Trek. Retail journalism. Online publishing before online publishing felt normal.

That is not a single lane.

It is a working life built around structure.

Haring belonged to the class of tabletop professionals who turned brilliant, messy, overgrown ideas into products players could actually use. He wrote. He edited. He developed. He managed lines. He reviewed. He explained. He helped a game company talk to its players clearly enough that the players stayed.

That work can disappear when it is done well.

The reader finds the rule. The magazine arrives. The errata makes sense. The sourcebook holds together. The line does not collapse under its own parts.

Then history gives the biggest credit to the person who had the original idea.

Haring’s legacy is a reminder that the original idea is only the beginning.

Somebody has to make the machine hold.

The Austin Engine

Scott Dennis Haring was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1958 and built much of his professional life around Austin, Texas.

He studied journalism at Texas A&M University, and that detail matters. Tabletop games are often treated as pure invention, but most of the work is communication. A rule is only as good as the player’s ability to understand it. A setting is only useful if the Game Master can find the pressure points. A magazine only matters if it can speak to a community on schedule.

Haring had the instincts of a journalist inside the body of a gamer.

Clarity. Deadlines. Audience. Voice.

Those instincts made him valuable at Steve Jackson Games, where he would work repeatedly across the years. Steve Jackson’s own tribute after Haring’s death says Haring worked for SJ Games five different times and calls him one of the people Jackson trusted deeply with writing and editing good copy.

That is not faint praise in a company built on sharp rules and sharp prose.

At SJ Games, Haring became one of the people who could take a living game line and make it legible.

Car Wars

Car Wars was already a great idea.

Post-apocalyptic road combat. Armed vehicles. Armor facings. Weapons. Speed. Control. A little cinema, a little math, and a lot of 1980s asphalt paranoia.

But a game like Car Wars creates its own gravity. The more players love it, the more parts they want. New vehicles. New weapons. New scenarios. New arenas. New organizations. New rulings. New questions about what happens when a rule from one issue hits a gadget from another supplement at 90 miles per hour.

That is where line work becomes design.

Haring was deeply tied to the Car Wars ecosystem. He edited Autoduel Quarterly, the magazine that gave the game an ongoing life between boxed releases. ADQ carried scenarios, fiction, rules answers, equipment, letters, and the sense that autoduelling was not just a game but a continuing world.

Before the internet, that mattered enormously.

A magazine like Autoduel Quarterly was not just marketing. It was community infrastructure. It told players the game was alive. It gave them fresh material. It gave them a place to send questions. It helped a complex tactical game keep breathing.

Haring also helped connect Car Wars to role-playing through GURPS Autoduel, co-authored with Aaron Allston. That book let the world outside the arena matter more. Players could move from vehicle builds and road duels into the broader life of the setting.

That was Haring’s kind of bridge.

Take a strong game engine.

Make the world around it easier to enter.

Gurps Horror

Haring also wrote GURPS Horror.

That book is easy to underestimate because GURPS became known for being able to do almost anything. But in the 1980s, proving that a generic, point-built system could carry horror was not automatic.

Horror has different needs than adventure.

It needs dread. It needs uncertainty. It needs fragility. It needs players to feel that knowing the rules does not mean mastering the room. It needs the Game Master to think about fear, pacing, revelation, and what happens when the ordinary world stops behaving.

GURPS Horror helped show how a universal system could bend toward atmosphere.

That was important for GURPS as a product line. A universal game only becomes convincing when it handles different genres without flattening them. If every supplement feels like the same physics lecture wearing a different hat, the promise fails.

Haring’s horror work helped the line say: yes, this engine can do mood.

Not just weapons.

Not just point costs.

Mood.

That same skill would follow him into later licensed work. Genre is not decoration. It changes what the rules need to teach.

Tsr And The Big Tent

Haring’s career also ran through TSR.

That matters because TSR was the industry’s big tent and big machine. Working there meant touching established settings, old rules, new editions, licensing, fiction, fantasy nations, superheroes, espionage, and the practical pressure of a company trying to feed a large audience.

Haring’s credits include The Republic of Darokin for the D&D Gazetteer line, Otherlands, editing work on The Complete Thief’s Handbook, and material connected to Marvel Super Heroes and Top Secret/S.I.

Those are very different assignments.

Darokin is fantasy economics and politics. The Complete Thief’s Handbook is class expansion and player-facing procedure. Marvel Super Heroes asks for comic-book scale, power stunts, and bright action logic. Top Secret/S.I. lives closer to espionage and modern danger.

That range tells you something.

Haring was not only a specialist in one house style. He could move between systems and ask the working question:

What does this product need to do for the person using it?

That question is less glamorous than "what is the coolest idea here?" but it is often more important.

An RPG book is not a private notebook. It is a tool. It has to survive contact with a table that is tired, distracted, opinionated, and looking for the rule that settles the argument.

Haring wrote and edited like he knew that.

PYRAMID

If Car Wars showed Haring as line editor and GURPS showed him as genre builder, Pyramid showed him as an industry voice.

Steve Jackson Games launched Pyramid as a broader gaming magazine, and Haring became one of its defining editors. He edited much of the print run and later helped guide the move to an online subscription format.

That move was bold.

In the late 1990s, taking a gaming magazine online was not the obvious safe path. Print still carried prestige. The web was messy. Paid digital content was still a strange proposition for many readers. But the economics of magazines were changing, and SJ Games pushed Pyramid into a new model.

Haring helped make that transition work.

Online Pyramid offered articles, reviews, forums, playtest access, and a more direct connection between publisher and audience. It was not the same as modern crowdfunding, Discords, Patreons, or digital tool ecosystems, but it was part of the road that led there.

It treated game writing as something that could live online, update regularly, and build a paying community.

That looks ordinary now.

It was not ordinary then.

Haring’s Pyramid work also showed his voice as a critic. He could be direct, practical, and unsentimental about the business of games. He understood that beautiful design still has to ship, sell, and support itself. He could praise ambition, but he did not mistake amateur chaos for virtue.

That made him valuable.

The hobby needs dreamers.

It also needs someone who can read the invoice, the deadline, and the rule paragraph.

Star Trek

Later, Haring worked on Decipher’s Star Trek Roleplaying Game, including the Narrator’s Guide.

That was another perfect test of his strengths.

Star Trek is easy to brand and hard to run. A weak Star Trek game becomes space combat plus famous words. A useful Star Trek game has to help a table think in episodes. It needs mission structure, moral pressure, strange worlds, chain of command, scientific uncertainty, and room for a captain, engineer, doctor, security officer, and diplomat to all matter.

The Narrator’s Guide had to support that.

It was not only a pile of rules. It was a teaching document for the person trying to make Star Trek happen at the table. That is where Haring’s old habits mattered again: explain the moving parts, give the Game Master usable tools, and make the genre playable without making it generic.

By the early 2000s, Haring had already moved through tactical car combat, universal horror, D&D nations, superhero action, gaming journalism, and online publishing. Star Trek was another world with a different grammar.

He knew how to listen for that grammar.

The Editor As Designer

Tabletop history is still learning how to talk about editors.

Designers get remembered for mechanics. Artists get remembered for images. Founders get remembered for companies. Editors and developers often become invisible, even when they are the people who made the whole thing usable.

Haring’s career pushes against that invisibility.

Editing in tabletop is not just spelling and commas. It is mechanical triage. It is spotting contradictions between chapters. It is asking whether a rule can be found at the moment it matters. It is telling a brilliant freelancer that the clever paragraph does not help the reader. It is keeping the product line from arguing with itself.

That is design.

It is not always original invention, but it shapes play just as surely.

Players experience the editor’s work every time a rulebook answers the next question in the right order.

They only notice when it fails.

Haring spent his career in the places where failure would have been very noticeable.

What He Actually Built

Scott Haring did not create Car Wars alone. Steve Jackson and Chad Irby created the original game.

He did not create GURPS alone. Steve Jackson designed the core system.

He did not create Dungeons & Dragons, Marvel Super Heroes, Star Trek, or the companies he worked for.

What Haring built was continuity.

He helped make Car Wars feel like a living world. He helped GURPS stretch into horror and autoduelling. He helped TSR products become clear enough to use. He helped Pyramid become a bridge between print gaming journalism and digital community. He helped Star Trek’s Narrators understand how to make a television genre work at a role-playing table.

That is not a small legacy.

It is the legacy of the professional who arrives after the big idea and asks the question that decides whether anyone else can use it:

How does this actually work?

Where He Remains

Scott Haring died on July 1, 2025, after a long illness. He was 67.

The tributes that followed did not read like routine industry notices. They read like people remembering a colleague who made things better, funnier, clearer, and more alive. Steve Jackson remembered the editor, the gamer, the baseball fan, the singer, the friend, and the man whose desk carried the evidence of a full personality.

That fits the work.

Haring’s name remains in books and magazines that taught players how to keep playing: Autoduel Quarterly, GURPS Horror, GURPS Autoduel, Pyramid, TSR sourcebooks, Decipher’s Star Trek material, and the long paper trail of a hobby becoming more professional without losing its strange joy.

Some people design the engine.

Some people keep it tuned.

Scott Haring was one of the people who kept it tuned.