This weekend I sat down in the player's chair again. After an extended and glorious fight two weeks ago, the D&D game reached a "chapter break" and we picked a new game to play for a few months while my brain recovers from high level D&D 3.5 prep. The game we selected is Aces and Eights. We have played around with it a couple of times in the past-- ...

No GM should be an island of ideas. As a GM we are a creative bunch and have many ideas floating around our head: a plot for a future session, a killer encounter, a new artifact, an NPC, etc. Let’s be honest not all of our ideas are great, and worst a lot of them sound great to us, but fail to impress the players when we drop ...

This past weekend I just finished running a medium length campaign for my group. The game had been a play test and world-building project. The group travelled far and wide across the world and grew to great heights of notoriousness . . . uh, I meant fame.  A couple of sessions before the projected finish of the campaign, a few members of the group told me how much ...

Excuse the cliché of telling you about my campaign, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do here. Except that this is about the techniques used to run the game, and not the clever divine dynamic or the really cool twists on the basic fantasy races. My last campaign was traditional D&D v3.5, which I ran almost entirely from a laptop, learning enough to write not ...

While prepping for my regular Sunday game yesterday, I came across an incredible link on Boing Boing. This might already be floating around out there in the general gaming geekdom, but I hadn't found it yet and felt it needed sharing! A gamer who seems to go by the online name of Burntwire took two years to build his gaming space into a great place to fit ...

It's March fourth, and you know what that means: we all march fo(u)rth for GM's Day! Happy GM's Day from all of us gnomes, from the bottom of our grubby gnomish hearts* -- GMs of the world, you rock! This year, we're officially lame: We're so insanely busy getting all of our ducks in the row for the upcoming release of our first book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire ...

When we last left off, I had taken you through the Fiasco book and mechanics. (If you missed yesterday’s article go back and read it…now). The real question is, how does this game actually play, without any prep or any GM? The short answer is that it does it quite well, but to really understand, let me tell you about a guy name Rico. Rico Is So Dead Shortly after ...

Today I am going to review a game that does not require a GM. Yes, its true.  Let me repeat that. Gnome Stew, the leading blog for GM advice, is going to review an RPG that does not use a GM. Today I will take you through the game book and discuss the nuts and bolts, and then tomorrow, I will show you why playing it will make ...

Regular readers know that the gnomes have been working on a secret project for some time now, and we've been tight-lipped about details. Thanks to the way GenCon event registration is timed, as of today our first official teaser about the project has gone live: SEM1009173 Eureka! Cooking Up Adventure Plots with Gnome Stew Join the infamous Gnomes of Gnome Stew, and learn about their first book: Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to ...

I just got back from our trip to Walt Disney World. For the second time we decided to drive rather than fly and stopped in North Carolina along the way. Even before we started, our mini-van was filled with accents. I have a South Jersey accent (no, I don't sound like Rocky or Tony Soprano, although I do pronounce that wet stuff as "wooder"). My in-laws are from ...

I’ve been running my gaming group through a dungeon using Dungeonaday.com. In the last session the group came across a really well written puzzle and it got me thinking about the use of puzzles in games. Puzzles can be incredibly fun or incredibly frustrating. From the GM’s perspective, you don’t want to give the players something so easy it won’t feel like they have overcome anything, but ...

When I'm playing but not GMing (as is the case right now), part of my brain is always watching -- and trying to learn from -- my GMs. During my group's Eberron campaign session last night, I got to watch a great GM handle a tricky balancing act brilliantly, and I wanted to share some of what I took away from that experience. The Quick Setup The PCs in this campaign ...

No, you're not all gnomes named Myers Briggs... Myers Briggs is a classification system that's popular in high school sociology classes and business books. Quizzes to determine your personality type were also frequently passed around in email from my friends and relatives; this quiz classifies various Harry Potter characters and tells you who you overlap. (For this set of phrasings, I'm Harry Potter, strangely. To skip the ...

While watching Star Wars the other day, okay Something, Something, Something, Dark-side, I realized that very few people in the Star Wars stories(aside from Jedi) had that many "special" powers. Sure the Jedi and Sith are the powerhouses of the universe, but for the most part everyone was on the same playing field. Tech of course made some people better *cough cough* Bobba fett *cough cough* and a ...

In what must be the most brazen or naive scheme ever devised by those foul-smelling doglike lizards, some Kobolds have asked us Gnomes to review the latest issue of their magazine, tempting us with a free PDF issue. Do these Kobolds really think that a new edition means that all the old rivalries are forgotten? Do they think that a simple bribe will make up for past atrocities? Can ...