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
The Five Room Dungeon has been around almost as long as RPGs themselves, and has been enjoying a surge of popularity in the past few years as a quick and easy way to build a dungeon crawl. Interestingly enough, it turns out there are only 9 base designs for the five room dungeon. With so few, it’s very easy to simply grab one of the nine, populate it ...
Martin's recent article on inking his new GameScience dice naturally led to a spirited discussion about GameScience's claims that their dice are the best dice available in terms of randomness, which quite naturally leads one to ask: "Is my favorite die fair? How can I tell?" One possibility is to perform a chi*-square goodness of fit test. This doesn't include any difficult math, though it can be tedious ...
Like Most GMs, you probably find your self wondering from time to time just how competent your players are. Are they the well oiled, expertly min-maxed team they claim to be, or are they a bunch of bumbling monkeys? Luckily there’s a simple mathematically accurate method to test their claims based on simple linear algebra:
Start with your dungeon map. Here’s a sample randomly generated dungeon from Donjon RPG ...
As a GM, you’ll often have extra ideas that you have no current use for or ideas for some future game. Stealing an idea from writers, you can write a few sentences about each one (so that you don’t end up stumbling across a note like “junkyard angel and transceiver of the gods” and wonder what the hell you were thinking) on a post-it note and stick the ...
The megadungeon is a historical and exciting campaign model with a simple appeal that's a convenient platform for pickup games, but building one can be an intimidating challenge. There are probably as many approaches to building the megadungeon as there are approaches to the megadungeon proper. Here is one such approach.
Step 1: Start with the "Swiss Cheese Assumption"
This assumes that the ground is full of natural caves, passages, ...
Most RPG settings feature the same level-tiered setup. The PC’s home base is surrounded by an area populated by first level monsters, while the next concentric area is populated by second level monsters and so on. It’s usually a bit more complex than that, but that’s the basic model. Problem is, the basic model, and any models flowing from it are bullshit. Of course, it’s always done that ...
Think back to the scenery from the last public restroom you frequented. Chances are you were treated to a visual smorgasbord of human expression. In that 15 minutes or so, you were probably exposed to more poetry, art, comedy gold and political satire than you were for the rest of the week (if you’re a social recluse like me anyway).
People graffiti whenever they have sufficient motivation and feel ...
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 ...
