Welcome to Gnome Stew!

Gnome Stew is a multi-author blog about tabletop RPG game mastering, written by GMs, for GMs. We think about GMing in every waking moment (okay, GMing and hot, hot gnome sex meals), so we figured we’d put our obsession to good use.

We started Gnome Stew because we believe that GMs are under-served in the RPG community. There are few websites and even fewer books dedicated to game mastering — GMs usually get one chapter in a larger work, and that often doesn’t address a lot of what we actually do at the gaming table.

Here on the Stew, it’s all game mastering, all the time, from system-neutral GMing advice and ideas to system-specific tips to help make running your games easier and more fun. We’re all experienced GMs, and we love sharing our knowledge — and learning new GMing tricks and techniques from our readers.

That focus has helped make Gnome Stew the most widely read GMing blog on the planet, and one of the largest respositories of GMing material anywhere — we hope you enjoy it!

“I check Gnome Stew every day.” — Monte Cook

“fantastic blog for game masters, dungeon masters, and rpg fans” — Wil Wheaton (read testimonials)

The Gnomes

You can read a little bit about the authors of Gnome Stew over on the Meet the Gnomes page. Martin Ralya is the Head Gnome, and fields questions and feedback about the site at: martin(AT)gnomestew(DOT)com.

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Read our comment policy and register.

Gravatars

Gnome Stew supports Gravatars — globally recognized avatars. If you already have a Gravatar, there’s nothing you need to do — it’ll show up next to every comment you make here.

If you don’t, get one here. They’re free, and lots of sites support them.

Posting Schedule

There are three things everyone knows about gnomes: We’re short, we’re lazy, and we’re all Chaotic Neutral. It’s a lesser-known fact that we don’t have a posting schedule, but we’re doing our part to spread the word. (Rest assured that there will be plenty of articles to read here every week.)

Acknowledgements

Darren Hardy, who is made of pure awesome, designed the site and created our logo. (The original design was a customized version of the Grid Focus theme by Derek Punksalan, bits of which survive in the new design.)

Kudos to the free (or cheap) and awesome stuff that lets us bring you Gnome Stew:

Blogging: We blog with WordPress. FeedBurner keeps our RSS and email feeds all groomed and pretty.

Hosting: Gnome Stew rocks on DreamHost. (Need hosting yourself? Use that link when you sign up with DreamHost, and Gnome Stew gets several months of free hosting at no cost to you.)

Plugins: We heart Akismet, Exec-PHP, FeedBurner FeedSmith, Feed Count, Get Recent Comments, No Self Pings, Random Redirect, Register Plus, ShareThis, Subscribe To Comments, WP Ajax Edit Comments, WP-Cache, and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. (This list might not be completely up to date.)

In the Beginning

We launched Gnome Stew on May 12th, 2008, with a bit more than 60 registered members and 250 RSS and email feed subscribers. Thank you to everyone who has joined, subscribed, read, and spread the word about the Stew.

Tiny Disclaimer: Gnome Stew is in no way affiliated with Halfling Soup. And we’ve heard it tastes just awful. Which is what you’d expect, really.