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
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: ...
Steampunk is all the rage these days, but have you ever considered the etymology of the word? The term Steampunk is clearly derived from Cyberpunk, with the major difference being one features ubiquitous steam tech, the other ubiquitous cyber tech. Aside from that, the titles say they're not supposed to be all that different. Which is to say that they share the "punk" aspect, which carries the entire flavor of ...
It seems everywhere you go that someone is telling you to say “Yes” to your players. Saying “Yes” is more or less de rigueur these days, and you can’t use an area of effect ability without hitting three members of Baker’s cult of “Say ‘Yes’ or roll the dice.” Said too many times though, the simple “Yes” can turn even an excellent GM into a drooling bitter burnout, ...
The supers genre seems fairly straightforward. Discussions of themes and ages aside, most supers games and campaigns follow a fairly standardized set of plot structures. Oddly though, in the unassuming supers game lies some potent forms of player narrative control. Chief among these is the PC origin story.
In the supers origin story, the player generally gets to dictate the way in which the PC gained or discovered their ...
Languages in RPGs have a lot of potential, but they often get relegated to the realm of soulless mechanics, or even hand waved completely. Looking at novels, we see that languages are used as inspiration, flavor, and to instill a sense of wonder.
Languages are mysterious:
If no one in the group knows a language, that language and what it holds is a mystery. This is especially true if it's resistant to magic ...
A few weeks back I wrote about how to quickly hammer out a series of timelines for NPC factions for your game. In the course of using the timelines I’d made I found myself asking the question: “How do I know when to pull the trigger on the next stage of the timeline?”
The easy answers are “Whenever is dramatically appropriate”, “Whenever you feel like it.” or even “When ...
Somehow it seems surreal that we’re on the third of these yearly articles. Like the last two years, here are some campaigns from the minds of the gnomes that we want to share with anyone who can use them. As usual, if you’ve got a backburnered campaign of your own, share it in the comments! If none of this year’s offerings catch your eye, try the past ...
It never fails. You’re playing a platformer video game, doing pretty well, and then BAM! Ice level. That’s the level where the designers thought something akin to:
“You know what would be really funny? Let’s make the players do the same precision jumping dodging and attacking as every other level, but instead of adding some feature or theme to make it fun and interesting, let’s add one that intentionally ...
I’m currently prepping a Trail 0f Cthulhu Campaign. Usually I opt to run Mythos based campaigns as one-shots or “monster of the week” style campaigns, but this time I chose to go for a multi-faction conflict game in which the mythos is involved in it’s own internecine struggles for scarce resources and the investigators must choose the lesser evil, oppose all comers, play the sides off against one ...
