Author: Martin Ralya

Building on the idea of die drop tables and tools in Vornheim, I came up with a simple approach to quickly generating a region: the drop map. I had fantasy hexcrawls in mind when I wrote this, and the map I’ve created using this method is for that sort of game. There’s no reason you couldn’t fiddle with this in all sorts of ways to produce maps for larger/smaller regions, other genres, or even other kinds of maps entirely. It’s deliberately a lazy, quick, flexible…

Happy GM’s Day! GM’s Day started on EN World back in 2002, and is now in its 11th year. The date, March 4, sums it up: March Fo(u)rth for GM’s Day. Today is also the anniversary of Gary Gygax’s death in 2008, and in my mind the coincidence of those two dates, while not a happy one because I’d much rather still have Gary in the world, is fitting. He gave us a tremendous amount, gamers in general and GMs in particular. So sláinte, Gary,…

As we announced last week, we’ve licensed our GMing books to Lone Wolf Development for integration into their Realm Works campaign management software, which is currently wrapping up a very successful Kickstarter campaign. The campaign is now in its final day or so, already over $120,000 ($20,000 more than their goal, so it’s fully funded). If you’re interested in getting our GMing books integrated into this system for free, you can back at or above these three levels (all of which include Realm Works itself):…

Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing are partnering with Lone Wolf Development to integrate the content from all three of our books into their forthcoming Realm Works campaign management software. Backers of the Kickstarter campaign for Realm Works will be able to access Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, and Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters within Realm Works for free. What’s Realm Works? Realm Works is a system-neutral tool that enables…

There were 20 entries in the second annual New Year, New Game challenge. That’s a big drop from the first year’s 57, but there were still some excellent ideas (that followed the rules!) in the mix. Our two winners offered up wildly different ideas joined by a common thread: They sound like really cool games to play in. Without further ado, the winners are… Second Prize In second place is Gnome Stew reader Cloudyone, whose “Abandoned Heroes” pitch went like this: 冷落罗汉 (The Abandoned Heroes)…

The second annual NYNG challenge has ended, which means we have a bevy of blog posts about running new games to share with you! We had 12 posts this year, and a wide range of topics under the new game umbrella were covered. Thank you to all of the bloggers who wrote a post for this carnival, and I hope we’ll see you all again in 2014. Blog Posts about Running New Games You’ll find inspiration, tips, and clever ideas in these dozen posts: Babil…

Today is the last day to enter our 2013 New Year, New Game challenge and submit your post for the 2013 NYNG blog carnival. Sometime tonight I’ll shut the contest down and start pulling everything together for the big wrap-up post for the blog carnival. Don’t wait too long! (Comments on this post have been turned off so that no one accidentally tries to enter the contest here, which wouldn’t count.)