Award-Winning GMing Advice
Gnome Stew won the silver ENnie Award for Best Blog in
2011 and
2010 -- thank you for your support! Online since 2008, we've published
1,183 articles packed with GMing tips and advice, as well as
two books for GMs. Our
top 30 articles make a great starting point for new readers.
"I check Gnome Stew every day." -- Monte Cook
"fantastic blog for game masters, dungeon masters, and rpg fans" -- Wil Wheaton
"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
Today is Gnome Stew's fourth birthday -- we launched the site on May 12, 2008. (You can see all of our launch day articles here.)
Sometimes I think the Stew comes off as a more polished operation than it really is. Not in the sense that we don't put time and energy into producing polished content, because we do. But we started out as a bunch of GMs who ...
Gnome Stew now has a mailing list. Here's the skinny:
Want to receive occasional emails from Gnome Stew, emphasis on occasional?
If you change your mind, you can unsubscribe any time. We'll never share your email address with anyone, period.
Every now and then, we'll share something with you that we think you'll be interested in -- like the opening of preorders for our next book, Phil Vecchione's Never Unprepared, or ...
This is a companion piece to my previous article, A "Realistic Enough for Fantasy" Calendar, but it also stands on its own. If you want to combine a fantasy calendar with randomly generated weather, you may enjoy them both.
For my Bleakstone hex crawl, weather and the calendar became connected when I ran across the idea of pre-generating a year's worth of random weather in advance. That post, which ...
On June 4th, we'll be opening preorders for our newest book: Phil Vecchione's Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep, published by Engine Publishing. You can read more about the book itself in our first announcement -- today I want to share the cover and a sample from the foreword by Sean Patrick Fannon.
The cover
Our cover artist, Matt Morrow, supported by our art director, John ...
Tourq Stevens, who runs the RPG Site of the Year awards, sent me this piece of feedback from one of the judges. The Stew was a finalist, but The Id DM won -- and congratulations to that site, because it's excellent.
Here's the feedback:
"Gnome Stew is the daddy. A powerhouse of a site with articles from the A-List of role-playing bloggers. So why is it not in 1st place ...
I recently created a calendar for my fantasy hexcrawl, Bleakstone, and since it was a fun process and I'm pleased with how it turned out I thought I'd share it here.
I wanted a calendar that was largely similar to the one we're used to (the Gregorian calendar) without being identical, that evoked the flavor of the world, and which didn't have any fussy bits -- no leap years, ...
Thanks to you, our readers, the Stew is a finalist for the 2012 Site of the Year Awards! Thank you very much for voting for us!
The other four finalists are Dungeon's Master, G*M*S Magazine, The Id DM, and Nearly Enough Dice. Congratulations to all of the finalists!
Our fate is now in the hands of the SOTY judges (there isn't another round of fan voting), who will announce the ...
Gnome Stew is up for consideration in the 2012 Site of the Year awards, and I'd love it if you would vote for us. Voting takes a few seconds and requires no registration -- just click the big red button on this page, select us on the poll, and vote.
Today is the ONLY day to vote for Gnome Stew. They posts a new group of sites every day ...
One of our goals for Gnome Stew in 2012 is to be more selective about reviews. Each gnome approaches that goal in a different way -- for me, it means saying "No" a lot and generally only reviewing things that are specifically GMing-related. Not "GMs can use this," or "It's a game with a GM." GMing tools and resources. (Unless something is really good/bad or I'm really excited ...
In preparation for the release of the upcoming DCC RPG from Goodman Games, I recently acquired a set of GameScience dice.
If you're not familiar with GameScience, Col. Lou Zocchi, or why these dice are different from the dice you're probably used to, these two GenCon 2008 video sales pitches by the colonel himself are a good place to start: part 1, part 2.
Here's the short version: GameScience is ...
This is the fourth year that the annual One Page Dungeon Contest has been held online, and it's well worth checking out.
The idea behind one-page dungeons is that...wait for it...they have to fit on one page. It might not sound like you could get much dungeon on a single page, but you can. Like any limitation, the format forces you to be creative within its constraints, and that's ...
Phil's been hinting at it on Google+ for months, but today we're making it official: Gnome Stew's own Phil Vecchione (DNAphil) has written a book for GMs, and as the publisher I'm thrilled to be able to announce it here.
The book is Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep. To the best of my knowledge, it's the first gaming book devoted entirely to preparing for ...
Ever since Troy's article about running red box D&D for his kids at the end of January, I've been immersing myself in the OSR (Old School Renaissance). It's been a ton of fun, and one aspect in particular has been some of the most fun I've had as a GM in years.
Even though I started gaming with the Mentzer red box, I never fully experienced old school play ...
Happy GM's Day! This most excellent holiday rolls around every year on March fourth, hence the slogan "March Fo(u)rth for GM's Day," and I believe this will be the 10th anniversary of GM's Day. (You can read about the history on GM's Day on EN World.)
In keeping with 2012's "more meat, less meta" approach here on the Stew, we're going to share some of our favorite cross-game-applicable (IE, ...
A little while back, I had the pleasure of working with Robert M. Everson on the gnomes' second book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game. Not long after that, he shot me an email expressing an interest in proofreading Gnome Stew articles, and we jumped at the chance to have Robert (aka Spenser here on the Stew) make us look better.
This turned out to be more ...
