Author: Martin Ralya

Preorders for our next book, Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management, will be opening on June 3, and we want you to be able to check out the book before deciding whether to preorder. You can now download a free 9-page PDF preview of Odyssey that includes the cover, table of contents, introduction, and opening section. This should give you a good idea of what topics the book covers and how it approaches them. The initial announcement of Odyssey also offers some…

Five years ago today, Gnome Stew went live with 10 articles and around 250 RSS subscribers. In that five years we’ve published around 1,400 articles, had 1.7 million visitors, drawn 25,000 comments, won three ENnie Awards and an RPG Site of the Year Award, and published three GMing books (soon to be four). The Stew has gone places and done things I never expected. We’ve had some downs, but it’s been mostly ups — and the ups have been pretty damned awesome. And much of…

Written by award-winning authors Phil Vecchione and Walt Ciechanowski, the fourth book from Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing is coming in July: Odyssey: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Campaign Management. Opening with a foreword by RPG industry legend Kenneth Hite, Odyssey is, to our knowledge, the first book of its kind. It offers up 200 pages of system-neutral advice on starting, managing, and ending campaigns for game masters of all stripes and experience levels. Tell me more! You may have guessed from the title…

Microscope is a superb game in its own right, and one I recommend without reservation, but it also features two things that you can easily make use of in other games: collaborative setting creation and its yes/no list. Collaborative setting creation is the point of Microscope; it’s the whole game. When you play Microscope, you build a setting and its history together in a unique and fascinating way. After two sessions, when my group wrapped up a game bracketed by humanity’s first contact with aliens…

Gnome Stew won the 2013 RPG Site of the Year award! Many thanks to you, our readers, who voted for us in the nomination round! Your voting efforts got us nominated last year as well, but the judges chose a different winner. Winning this year’s SOTY award was a fantastic surprise — and a one-time event, as winners aren’t eligible in future years. I encourage you to check out the other four SOTY finalists: Kobold Press, G*M*S Magazine, Age of Ravens, and Nearly Enough Dice.…

We’ve entered the Stew for consideration in the 2013 RPG Site of the Year Awards, and if you’ve got 10 seconds to spare I’d like to ask you to vote for us. There’s no registration required; just visit this page, scroll down to the poll, select Gnome Stew, and hit Vote. Today is the only day Gnome Stew is eligible for votes. The way the SOTY Awards work several sites are posted each day for voting, and the single highest vote-getter advances to the final…

Jesse Butler of Calico Games offered me an advance copy of Short Order Heroes, his combination light RPG, character creation supplement, and spontaneous NPC creation aid, and liking how it sounded I accepted his offer. It’s on Kickstarter for $20, with more cards possible if stretch goals are met. It’s that last use — NPC creation — that interests me, and that I think is most likely to interest Gnome Stew readers. I’m a sucker for anything that lets me quickly develop characters, like our…