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
1,109 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
If you’re like me you’ve found yourself thinking the following: “I need to make an encounter table for this area. It’s a swamp, so I’ll just go though all my monster books and make a list of all the monsters that can live in swamps…” and then three pages of paper and way too much time later you succumb to information overload, shelf it and go do something ...
It’s that time of the year again, where as a belated holiday gift, I hand out my accumulated B-string campaign ideas from the previous year. Lucky you! The real gift however, is the ideas in the comments section from readers.
These are not only great campaign ideas, but they can be dropped into an ongoing game as a new location hook. And if you’re on the lookout for a ...
Back when I wrote about using 100 Blank White Cards as tool for world creation, Martin asked for an example. Since Martin is the boss here at the stew, that means you get a follow-up article. With 30 of our previously created cards, and another 30 blanks, my wife and I set out to create a setting for a fantasy game.
With our first two cards, we were off ...
Often times, the ideas we have in our head don’t translate to paper very well because they’re just too darn complex. Case in point, years ago, inspired by the 1986 adventure Night of the Seven Swords and by the play reports of a friend of mine, I wrote my own adventure “Return to The Carnival of the Damned” and it’s follow up: “Son of Return to The Carnival ...
Just in time for Halloween, I received a PDF copy of Open Design’s Red Eye of Azathoth. One of the underlying concepts of the Cthulhu mythos is that the horrors against which the heroes struggle are inhumanly intelligent and incredibly long-lived or possibly immortal. Thus investigators rarely get to see the long term implications of the villain’s plots. Instead, there is the assumption that there’s more history to ...
1000 Blank White Cards is a fun game on it’s own, but it’s also a tool that can be twisted to any number of uses. Here's just one way to make it’s creative synergy and frenetic energy work for you: use it to design your campaign world. Like other collaborative world building methods, this system allows your entire group to have input into your campaign world. It also ...
A card game that’s played by creating the cards with which it is played, 1000 Blank White Cards is a perfect game for those times when your group is between games or unable to play your regular game for whatever reason.
According to lore, 1000 Blank White Cards was created by Nathan McQuillen of Madison, Wisconsin. During a coffee run, he spied a box labeled, “1000 blank white cards” ...
GMs must populate their settings with plenty of fun and interesting locations and after a while it can be tough to create new and fresh locations and to keep similar locations distinct from one another in your head. Over time every creepy forest tends to blur together and you don’t remember the difference between Fenwood and Bramblescar.
Locations also have the capacity to be a major prep time-sink. Good ...
Every year I’ve written a garage sale article for The Stew in which I toss out all the campaign ideas I’ve had during the year that I’m unlikely to get to in the near future. It seems that many of The Stew’s readers have a similar overabundance of ideas, since every year the garage sale article gets comments from readers detailing their own campaigns that aren’t likely to ...
This is the final installment of our smart villain series, in which we discuss the smart villain’s gear. Prior parts discuss Overview, Community, and Lair External and Internal defenses.
The final line of defense a smart villain has is his personal possessions. If his contacts, his lair, his tricky tactics, and his guardians fail, all he has left are his stylish pants and whatever he has in them.
Your smart ...
In the first three parts of The Smart Villain, we talked about general approaches to smart villains, the community, and external lair defenses. This time we’re looking at interior lair defenses and tactics. In our final installment we’ll discuss the smart villain’s gear.
So as the smart villain, your base has been breached. Good thing you knew this would happen and you’ve planned accordingly with:
Traps: Much like outside the ...
In part 1 of The Smart Villain we talked about general approaches to smart villains. In part 2 we gave several strategies for how the smart villain uses the community for defense. This time, we’re interested in the external defenses to the smart villain’s lair. Next time we’ll look at internal defenses and tactics, and our final installment will discuss the smart villain’s gear.
If pesky PCs manage to ...
In part 1 of The Smart Villain, we gave two general approaches to how smart villains are handled in game. In parts3 and 4 we’ll discuss the smart villain’s lair, and in our final part, we’ll take a look at the smart villain’s gear. This time we’re discussing, in depth, some community based strategies for your smart villain to employ. To the smart villain, community is of great ...
The smart villain is a common GMing problem. How do you portray a person who’s smarter than you? And because we’re talking about games of imagination we’re not even talking about people like Steven Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant: we’re talking about entities beyond the limit of human intelligences; dragons, alien intellects, super villains, mad AIs, godlings, and the like, and regardless if what Benson’s says about your ...
In Phil’s recent article: Prep-Lite: Maps, he proposes a system of making maps for your RPG that reduces prep time but still produces simple and elegant maps. In overview, Phil proposes breaking your map into important and unimportant rooms, making a rough map of the ways your important rooms connect, and using this as a framework for lite improvisation. However, Phil makes this provision in his article: ...
