This was our first blog carnival, but it won’t be our last — and with 14 participants (15 with us), I’d say it was a great first outing. A big THANK YOU to everyone who took time out of their January schedule to write a blog post for or about NYNG!

Posts about Running New Games

Want tips, ideas, and inspiration about running a new game this year? Check out these posts (appearing in the order they came out):

Sinister Forces

My New Game for the New Year! — Sinister Forces is the personal blog of Gnome Stew author Patrick Benson, and he used this post to share some details about the approach he’ll be taking when he runs Star Trek later this year.

“The Gassy Gnoll” at Game Knight Reviews

Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men with Nine Kids — GKR shared a session report about a recent new game: Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men, a kid-oriented RPG run for no less than nine kids!

Monkey in the Cage

New Year, New Game — Karen shares her group’s plans to run not just one new game this year, but four: Mouse Guard, Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and a homebrew called Society of Odin.

Paper & Plastic

How do you choose a new game? — Paolo Cecchetto shares advice about how to choose a new game — for him, it’s all about three key features.

Get Off My Lawn

New Year, New Game — Robert M. Everson (who, incidentally, worked with us on Masks) looks in his crystal ball and sees the Dresden Files, a D&D 5e playtest, and a one-shot of the new Marvel RPG.

Wired.com

A New Year and My New Game: The Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box With the Kids — GeekDad blogger MJ Harnish talks about running the PFRPG Beginner Box for his son, another dad, and that dad’s two sons.

Nearly Enough Dice

A simple tip to running a new game with a new system — Liz shares what really is a simple tip, but it’s one that has all sorts of repercussions if you don’t take it seriously (I’ve fallen into that trap myself).

The Player’s Side of the Screen

Burning in the New Year — Andy Hauge talks about why he GMs, why you should GM, and his plans to run Burning Wheel this year.

Robust McManly Pants on Average Display

New Year, New Game, New System, New Worries — Michael offers up an in-depth analysis of the potential problems — and opportunities — presented by his NYNG game of choice, Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.

Stargzer’s World

New Year, New Game — Stargazer is planning to run Shadow, Sword & Spell in 2012, and in this post he talks about this game’s build-the-world-as-you-go premise.

The Iron Tavern

New Year, New Games — IronWolf delves into a topic most GMs know well: breaking out of ruts and changing routines, and the motivation to do so.

The Contemporary Quixotist

New Year, New Gamers — rpgadvocate sets a high bar by choosing five games to run in 2012: Macabre Tales, Toypocalypse, Cosmic Patrol, Fiasco, and Lost Days of Memories and Madness.

Of Dice and Dragons

New Year, New Game — Scot Newbury focuses on running a new campaign (rather than a new RPG), and lays out five challenges that should make it an interesting experience for him as a GM.

Brightwind

New Year, New Game: Dogs in the Vineyard — David Bowers shares what happened when he tried, back in 2011, to run Dogs in the Vineyard set in the Star Wars universe.

Gnome Stew

How I Prep for the First Session of a New Game — To close things out, I shared my approach to running the first session of a new game here on the Stew.

Posts about NYNG

In addition to posts that were part of the blog carnival, NYNG itself also got some press from RPG bloggers. Thanks to these fine folks for spreading the word:

• Wired.com: New Year, New Game Launches
• Adventurando-se: Novo Ano, Novo Jogo
• Pontos de Experiência: Ano Novo, Jogo Novo

If I missed a NYNG post anywhere, please drop me a comment or an email and I’ll rectify that right away.

I hope you enjoyed reading these articles and taking part in the NYNG challenge. if you have any feedback for next year’s NYNG event, fire away in the comments.

“Stay home? But it’s Black Friday!”

Yes, stay home. (And get out of my article.) Stock up on gifts for your GM; they like that kind of stuff, and might kill your character last.

Instead of standing in some ‘big box’ store in the wee hours, wondering if the idiot customer ahead of you taking far too long to make a decision is an Occupy plant or really just a clueless douchebag, check out some of these deals (in no particular order):

• Kirin Robinson’s “Old School Hack” is free, as of last week’s DriveThruRPG newsletter. Get it before it costs money!
• RuneQuest and Glorantha are going out of print at the end of the month, and the prices (and reviews) are pretty danged good.
• 30% off at RPG Shop’s Holiday Clearance Sale section.
• Check out DriveThruRPG’s sales page at least every day for some cool bargains, as they’ll be switching ‘em up on you.
• Noble Knight Games is running a super fall sale through Monday, and is going in my bookmarks under ‘RPGs – out of print’.
• Paizo’s On Sale Now page has too much to detail here. But $10 towards shipping for orders over $100 is a good start.
• Tabletop Adventures’ Overlord and his consort both have birthdays in this illustrious month; in celebration or tribute (or maybe profit-slashing sabotage), his minions are having a 20% off sale. Check out the titles in-depth, and you might find a Gnome or two…
• Your Games Now not only has a sale page, but a page of free stuff.  That’s right, FREE!
• Fantasy Flight Games Holiday Sale includes quite a bit of their Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition stuff, along with quite a collection of war, card, and board games. (The Confrontation minis work just fine with most RPGs.)
• Beautiful Brains Books & Games has free shipping from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, along with a discount code and a “Minions of the Brain” customer loyalty program.
• Your Friendly Neighborhood Gaming Shop. They may or may not have any sales this weekend, but it’d be a great time to drop by and get some gift ideas for your players, your friends, or even yourself.

Did I miss anyone? If you know of a good sale, sound off in the comments section and and let us know!

Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ

RPG Mapping Software

For many years, I’ve felt like I wasn’t a true gamer because I didn’t have a world I’d been building since I was a little kid. I’ve built pieces of worlds, and helped write plenty of worldbuilding fiction, but never had a world all my own, like so many gamers do — one that I’d been adding to, bit by bit, until it became a rich and interesting place.

A couple weeks back, that changed. Fellow gnome Don Mappin almost talked me into doing NaNoWriMo with him this year (and I wish him the best of luck — godspeed, Don!), and while I was considering it I decided the first step for me would be to get a fantasy world sketched out.

I had an idea I really liked a few months ago, and everything came together in a rush. I’ve started working on that world I’ve always wanted to have, one that I hope will prove to be rich and fascinating and complex and entertaining enough to be the setting for future work.

And apart from a much-needed kick in the ass from Don, one of the things that got me there was Campaign Cartographer 3. I snagged a copy for half price on Loot, and I’m glad I did.

Everything I’d read about CC3 seemed to fall into two camps: “This software is like smooth, silky butter that will have you creating professional-quality maps in no time!” or “Trying to draw a line in CC3 is worse than getting a root canal while someone stomps on your balls!” For me, the truth is somewhere in between.

Is there a learning curve? You bet! It’s not the most user-friendly software around — but it is powerful, and doing the entire tutorial taught me the basics. I can now muddle together a world map, evaluate it, discard it, and start again with something a bit better.

I have no intention of producing maps professionally, so as long as I can produce maps that are useful to me I’ll be happy — and I’m well on my way. Is it for everyone? Nope; nothing is. But so far, I like it.

In the course of settling on CC3, I also checked out some other options. These were all suggested by Shane Knysh on Twitter — if you’re not a CC3 fan, maybe one of these will tweak your nipples:

• Fractal Terrains
• Hexographer
• Dungeonographer
• Fractal Mapper
• Dave’s Mapper

Worldbuilding with wikidPad

The other tool that collided with CC3 and my world idea was wikidPad, free wiki software recommended by one of my favorite authors and worldbuilders, Brandon Sanderson. (I wrote an article about the signing where he recommended it.)

Now instead of populating a Word document and an Evernote file with random world tidbits, I put every single thing I come up with for my world into wikidPad. I’m not a wiki conoisseur — most of my experience comes from using Obsidian Portal to run my Star Trek game (and I love OP), and from hating most other wiki software I’ve tried — but wikidPad is amazing.

It’s lightweight, simple to use, and does exactly what I need it to do — and not an ounce more. I already can’t imagine worldbuilding without it; it’s really that good.

Adventure Writing with Scrivener

On a related note, Don also recommended Scrivener for novel writing, and having downloaded it, done the extensive tutorial, and played with it a bit, it’s pretty awesome.

Scrivener should also work well for RPG writing, as discussed in this piece over on Population: One (via Stargazer’s World). It’s not free, but it’s quite reasonable — and via a NaNoWriMo promo you can get it for 20% or 50% off.

GMing Roundup

In no particular order, here are some interesting GMing-related things that have crossed my email/browser/desk in the past few weeks:

Subterranean Design is a tumblelog about caves, holes in the earth, weird portals, and other real places that nonetheless make for great inspiration for games. (Thanks, Kurt!)

rpgGM is a GMing blog I only just learned of, and it’s quite good. They also publish a book, The Adventure Creation Handbook, that might be of interest to Gnome Stew readers.

I’ve always said that one of the best things about GURPS books are their extensive bibliographies, and SJG has gone and made it incredibly easy to get access to them — all of them. You can check out the bibliography of just about every GURPS book in existence online, for free.

Monsters and Manuals has an interesting and passionate take on a rarely-considered reason why you shouldn’t fudge die rolls: because you suck at it, and your players can tell.

Before I close with some RPG background music recommendations, I wanted to draw your attention to this fascinating look at the disparity between the depiction of men and women at GenCon 2011 on Go Make Me a Sandwich (via RPGGeek. I had never realized just how one-sided much of what you see in the Exhibit Hall actually is, and it’s worth considering as a human being, a consumer, and as a GM who portrays the world to your players.

And Lastly, Some Music

I’ve been digging the crap out of the Hanna soundtrack (awesome movie, too). It wouldn’t fit as BGM for most games (perfect for some, though), but it’s amazing music to write to.

Kudos to Gnome Stew regular Rafe for recommending Two Steps from Hell (thanks, Rafe!): I recently picked up Archangel, and it’s excellent RPG BGM. The tracks are a bit same-y, but in the context of a larger playlist on shuffle, that’s not going to be an issue.

I haven’t bought their other album, Invincible, yet, but it’s on my list. They do trailer music — literally, the music movie companies buy to use in their trailers — so it tends to be epic, action-packed stuff.

That’s it for this edition of Martin’s Mentions — thanks for reading!

Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ

GMing Roundup

Play a New RPG Month is just what it sounds like: damned good advice for any GM (or player). If you’ve only run, or played, one RPG — or even mainly one RPG — you owe it to yourself and your group to try another one. It can be a fling, a temporary thing, but if you choose wisely it will open new doors.

Ever wish D&D 3.x ended at 6th level? Well, it can. E6 is a nifty little 3.x hack that I found out about via RPGGeek, and it’s a great example of how you can make a profound but relatively simply change to a game and wind up with a completely new experience.

Gamemastering is a book about…wait for it…game mastering! It’s a free 300-page PDF, and there’s a reasonably priced print edition available on Amazon, as well.

The author, Brian Jamison, approached me for some feedback back in 2007, and I didn’t realize that the book had come out. It’s a pretty particular approach to GMing, but one that will (and does) appeal to a lot of folks — definitely worth a look.

Also on the book front, I’m reading HeroQuest right now (based on a recommendation from RPGnet), and it’s fantastic. It takes a narrative approach to everything in a way that’s new to me. For example, in HQ the question wouldn’t be “How hard would it be to leap across that chasm” but “Would the PC make that leap if this were a Jackie Chan movie?”

There are lots of pages in HQ that I’d say are worth the price of admission — single pages that have the potential to change how you GM, any one of which is worth $30 — but the cake is taken by the pass/fail flow chart for adventure pacing. Gold.

The Jack Vasel Memorial Fund

When Tom Vasel, best known for his Dice Tower reviews, posted a video tribute to his son, Jack, who lived for just over two months, I was moved to tears. It’s not just that it’s sad (which it is, and heart-breakingly so), it’s that it’s so positive despite the circumstances.

That Tom was able to take such a terrible loss and make something positive out of it says a lot about him, but a few months later he took it a step further: He created the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund, “a not-for-profit with a simple goal: raising and distributing funds to help gamers in their hour of need.”

It’s a hell of a good cause. They accept donations.

The Reference Adventure

This is a long walk, but bear with me — I think you’ll like the idea at the end. First, let me tell you about my character… Just kidding. Back when I did NaNoWriMo, I picked up No Plot? No Problem! to help me along the way. It’s a book on writing a novel in 30 days, and it’s quite good. The idea from it that’s stuck with me for several years, though, is this one: When you’re writing and you’re not sure how to handle something grammatically or structurally or what have you — like whether or not punctuation goes inside quotation marks, for example — you should have a reference book at hand to check.

But not an actual reference book: A book of the same type you’re trying to write, IE a novel, that you love. I use Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times, my favorite book by my favorite author. Whenever I’m uncertain about grammatical tidbit or style convention while writing, I flip open Interesting Times and see how Pterry and his editor handled it; then I do that.

And it occurred to me that this should also work when writing adventures: Pick your favorite published adventure, or scenario of your own devising, and keep it on hand for inspiration when you’re not sure how to handle an encounter, an important decision, a branching point, or some other structural element of the adventure you’re trying to write. This is your reference adventure. You could even keep a few adventures handy, one for each broad type — like your favorite dungeon crawl, your favorite sandbox mini-setting, etc.

I haven’t tried this, but it sounds pretty reasonable. If you try it, or already do this, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Inspiration for GMs

For my wife’s birthday, we went to the theater for a double feature. Fright Night was first, and quite enjoyable, but Rise of the Planet of the Apes was even better — doubly so because it has an awesome soundtrack. Full of pounding drums, this is great RPG background music as well as great writing music. It slants to action, but there’s a nice mix of other types of track, too.

When I read about Musica Cthulhiana in Knights of the Dinner Table, I went and checked them out immediately. Their music is explicitly designed as background music, so it’s ideal gaming fodder.

If your gaming BGM collection is light on creepy stuff, check out their three albums: Fragment, Feeder, and The Fourth. Good stuff.

In a horror vein, though of a very different stripe, I also recently devoured the first eight books of the Death Note manga series. (I picked up the Black Editions because they’re larger and have cool black-edged pages.)

The premise is dead sexy: A god of death leaves his notebook on Earth, and a mortal finds it; anyone whose name is written in the book will die. It goes to some very unexpected places, and from the concept to the characters to the notebook it’s full of inspiration for a different kind of horror or dark modern game.

To close us out, one more horror item: Marble Hornets on DVD. MH is a YouTube video series of “found footage” centered on a mysterious entity that seems to be stalking the poster’s college friend, but it’s so much more than that — I just don’t want to give it away.

It’s an amazing example of subtle horror, the kind where the criticism “But nothing happens!” can fairly be leveled at it — but it you like horror that creeps you out without telling you much, makes you think, and rewards close viewing, it’s pretty amazing. You can also watch the whole thing for free on YouTube; I recommend using headphones and watching it alone.

That’s it for this installment — I hope you found something here that inspired you!

Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ

The first installment of Martin’s Mentions seemed to go over well, so I’m sticking to that format for this edition. If you have an item to suggest, please email me: martin (at) gnomestew (dot) com.

GMing Roundup

The two latest “The Architect DM” articles over on Critical Hits were quite enjoyable. On Sandbox Campaigns looks at how starting a sandbox-style campaign (one where the PCs pick a direction and you adapt accordingly, more or less) is like entering a train station: lots of options, but once you pick one everyone knows which way it’s going, at least for a little while, and you don’t have to develop the other trains or destinations all at once or right away. It’s a great analogy that really clicked for me.

A little fuzzier but no less interesting is their look at nations as character backgrounds. This piece advocates having one-paragraph descriptions of all of the major nations in your game world (made much easier in a published setting, or with a wiki, of course!) available during character creation, both to inform your players’ background choices and to help define the world through those choices.

I also enjoyed this take on creating a GMing bucket list over on Campaign Mastery. Johnn has listed out a couple dozen D&D modules he wants to run before he dies, and it’s both a great idea and an intimidating one. I’ve done this with my unplayed board games, minus the bucket list association (I committed to play all the new ones before the end of 2011), and it’s helped me focus on what comes out at game nights.

With GenCon just days away, I loved RPG Blog II‘s Field Guide to GenCon Attendees. Zach has been to many a GenCon, and he’s spot-on: I’ve met all of these people. And if you’re thirsty for GenCon advice of a more serious variety, check out the Stew’s own GenCon Tips page, which is packed with info, links, and tips from the trenches.

Lastly, but never leastly, take a peek at the Gygax Memorial Fund. They’re raising money to build a memorial to E. Gary Gygax, the father of gaming, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Not only is it a good cause, but they’re going to be offering a book in exchange for $30 donations at GenCon 2011 (booth #1541), “Cheers, Gary,” which sounds delightful.

From the site: “Cheers, Gary is collection of some of Gary’s most remarkably warm and prolific correspondence with his fellow gamers at the EN World Q&A Threads.” After the con, the book will also be available on their website. I can’t make it to the con, but I plan to pick up a copy.

In closing, here’s my gaming group toasting Gary on the first anniversary of his death, March 9, 2009 — a gaming night, of course (and with the Stew’s own Don Mappin behind the camera):

TerraClips

WorldWorks Games is launching a minis-oriented product at GenCon 2011 that just about made me shit my pants: TerraClips. It’s kind of like a prettier, lighter, less durable version of Dwarven Forge‘s MasterMaze products, which are polystone — gorgeous, but heavy and expensive.

The idea is that you buy some packs, and some clips, and then build floors, streets, and 3D walls and roofed buildings) from it — and they look absolutely gorgeous. On top of that, you can build in layers, removing the street layer when the PCs head down into the sewers. You have to see this (image from the WorldWorks site):

They’re not cheap, but for what you get they also don’t seem overpriced: $49 gets you a nice-sized pack of floors, walls, trusses, roofs, ladders, staircases, and more, and the floor tiles are double-sided (currently aged wood/carved stone and different sewer options). Packs of 120 connectors run $18. They’ve got separate packs for streets, sewers, and buildings.

Seriously — check out the link; this looks amazing. I fully expect TerraClips to be what everyone is talking about after GenCon.

The Mistborn RPG

Crafty Games is going to be opening preorders for a Mistborn RPG on 8/4; you’ll be able to preorder at GenCon or online, and it looks like the preorders might close on 8/7. Mistborn is a series by Brandon Sanderson, one of my favorite authors (it begins with Mistborn, but the whole damn trilogy is awesome), and when I originally read the first book I kept thinking to myself, “This would make a great RPG.”

The mistborn are folks who can manipulate small amounts of ingested metal (infused into little vials of water) to propel themselves into the air, attract and repel metal, read minds, and perform other feats. What types of metal, how they’re used, and what your innate gifts and training let you do are the limiters, and they do all kinds of crazy shit in the books. The main characters sound like PCs to me, but not in a cheesy way — I’d love to play or run a Mistborn game.

On top of that, the Final Empire, the main setting in the novels, is fascinating, detailed, and also lends itself to gaming. There’s a central antagonist, lots of territory to work with, and plenty of background material.

The blurb on the CG website says that it’s “powered by an all new story-driven rules system,” which I find encouraging. Spycraft, based on reading not playing, doesn’t blow my skirt up. I don’t think that kind of rule set can do justice to Mistborn, so I’m glad that it sounds like they’ll be going a different route. To everyone going to GenCon this year, I’m now even more envious of you!

(Thanks to Dave over at Critical Hits for bringing this to my attention. The image is from the Crafty Games website.)

Inspiration for GMs

The soundtrack to Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is the first of the Harry Potter soundtracks I’ve actually bought, and it’s fantastic. The music in the previous movies, while always good, never really stood out for me (beyond a few standout tracks, anyway), but this soundtrack is moving and all-around excellent. It’s also perfect for RPG background music, with a split of about 40% ambient, 40% action, and 20% sinister tracks, if you use my system for creating BGM playlists (which is a bit out of date — I’ve switched to just three playlists, not the four it proposes).

Crossed (v. 1), by Garth Ennis — one of my favorite comic book writers — is one of the sickest comics I’ve ever read, but alongside all the depravity it’s also brilliant and well-told. It was riveting, and I stayed up way too late reading it. I’d describe it as The Walking Dead with scarier zombies — the crossed, who are much more human than zombies — and less hope.

From a GMing standpoint, it gave me plenty to think about in terms of just how far horror can be taken and still be scary, and how the scariest thing is often just people and their infinite capacity for cruelty — fertile ground for adventure plots!

On the non-comic front, I’m well into my rereading of A Clash of Kings, the second book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. It’ll take me a month or two to reach the new book, but it’s proving worthwhile — these books reward rereading, and I always forget just what a good writer GRRM is.

This series is great inspiration for low-magic, high-drama, human-centric fantasy campaigns, or for introducing those elements into a game that might not normally feature them. GRRM does all of those things better than any other fantasy author I’ve read.

Masks at GenCon

One last reminder on GenCon Eve: Studio 2 Publishing will have 65 copies of the limited run hardcover edition of our newest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, at booth #605. They’ll also be stocking Eureka.

This is your last chance to get a hardcover copy of Masks — once they’re gone, they’re gone! And if you do snag one or both books at the con, just send me a photo of your receipt and I’ll email you the PDF edition(s) for free.

Jolly Blackburn

Incidentally, I mentioned over on Google+ that my main inspiration for launching Martin’s Mentions was Jolly Blackburn’s editorials in Knights of the Dinner Table, and fellow gamer Tony Love had this to say:

Jolly is a good spiritual mentor. He’s taught a lot of gamers in not only the editorials, but even in his strips that we can learn a lot just as much from learning to laugh and relax in the hobby, I look forward to reading your work!

I couldn’t agree more.

As always, thanks for reading — and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ

Now that I’ve resurfaced from working on our second book, Masks, one of the things I want to get back to is posting Gnome Rodeos (link roundups) — but I think the format could use a shakeup and a fresh coat of paint, so I’m relaunching this old regular series as “Martin’s Mentions: Gnotes from Gnome Stew HQ.”

I want Martin’s Mentions to feel more like an editorial, more personal and less like just a list of links — even though links are still at its heart. It’s been awhile, so this first entry is over 1,500 words; I hope you dig it.

GMing Roundup

Campaign Mastery has a good article covering the many ways you can continue a campaign with an absent PC. I also recommend their piece on encounter and scene planning — here’s my favorite tip from that article, one that seems so obvious now that I’ve read it:

Traps are often meant as a delaying tactic, but too many can slow down the game to a crawl. They should be reserved for areas of danger that are meant to be protected, so the players can have some idea when to expect traps and when they are reasonably safe. Sometimes, even the threat of a trap is enough to keep the players on their toes.

Both of those articles are the kind of long-form advice that Campaign Mastery really excels at. Instead of going for short snippets and link-bait, they post evergreen material that you can bookmark and come back to. Good stuff!

I’d also like to highlight some recent posts by our fellow 2011 Best Blog ENnie nominees, all of which are well worth checking out:

• At-Will is all 4e, and mostly mechanics; it’s a blog I wasn’t familiar with before the nominations came out. Need some sea creatures? They have solid write-ups that include stat blocks. Like skill challenges? Check out their podcast about skill challenges, the latest episode of which covers when to use them (a topic my group struggled with, at times).
• Critical Hits posted a funny exploration of a dream-based adventure gone horribly wrong. Here’s my favorite bit: “When the first PC failed to break free of the lettuce and wound up mutating on a piece of evil toast, I realized I had far exceeded my ability to improvise. The first victim suddenly found himself with the hindquarters of a wooden wasp.” I also enjoyed the latest entry in the Architect DM series, which covers city architecture and the way little details can provide your players with a rich understanding of the campaign setting.
• Sarah Darkmagic focuses on D&D, and her writing and approach are excellent and engaging. On the GMing front, try her manual to WotC’s Monster Builder and her searchable adventure database, which is holy shit awesome. As a big fan of using non-gaming books for gaming, I also dug her look at the non-fiction book Warrior Women.
• Thistle Games is the final Best Blog nominee, and one that I’d never heard of before. Like Critical Hits, TG isn’t devoted entirely to RPGs, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to GMs. For example, I dare you to read part four of The Black Douglas, an historical piece that’s chock full of inspiration for battles and dirty politics, and not get the itch to run a game featuring those elements. I also like the concept behind their free Treasure RPG, which can be played as a tabletop RPG, a boardgame, or a light CCG, and combines elements of each.

Last but not least, in the comments on A Look at Downtime in RPGs and Board Games, Gnome Stew reader MonsterMike shared some info on Bean: The D2 RPG, a game designed to be easy enough to play with kids. As my daughter, Lark, has gotten older, I’ve been thinking more and more about RPGs she might enjoy in a couple of years, and this one has potential.

The system uses beans (or any other d2, but beans sure sound like more fun) as its resolution mechanic, and it employs team combat: the heroes all combine their “rolls” and compare that total to their foes’ combined total, which sounds like a fantastic approach for kids (or for lighter games in general — as MonsterMike pointed out, this is how Tunnels & Trolls handles combat, too).

New Open Design Project: Dark Roads and Golden Hells

Dark Roads and Golden Hells (awesome name!) is the latest patronage-based project from Open Design, the brainchild of Wolfgang Baur (of Kobold Quarterly fame).

Planescape was one of the AD&D 2e settings that really touched a nerve, in a good way, for a lot of GMs and players, and there have been several attempts to do something as cool since it went out of print. Golden Hells isn’t a full-on planar setting, though; it takes a different approach.

Here’s the quick skinny:

Rather than presenting a whole cosmology, Dark Roads and Golden Hells provides themes, flavourful locations, and special rules that can be integrated into any campaign setting, concentrating on locales tied to the Free City of Zobeck: The homes of prominent gods and devils, the planar domains of creatures like the shadow fey, and the afterlife of ghouls and kobolds.

That’s a neat approach — I like modular GMing tools, and most established D&D worlds already have a cosmology and a structure for their planar realms. Also nifty, for those of us not playing D&D/PF: “This is a setting book more than a heavy rules supplement…” — so there will be some mechanics, but I’ll be able to ignore them without sacrificing most of the book. I expect this to be a really cool book.

Its a patronage project, so by joining you get the PDF and a discount on the print book, as well as the opportunity to influence the design — and you can also pay more and have the opportunity to write part of the book yourself, as one of its designers (for which work you will then be paid).

RPG Blog Alliance

Michael Wolf of Stargazer’s World asked me to mention his latest project, the RPG Blog Alliance, and it’s something I think Stew readers will be interested in.

By my highly unscientific count, it’s the third major RPG blog network, the RPG Bloggers Network and the RPG Media Network being the first two biggies. The RPGBA is notable for having gained 200 new members in less than two months — it’s definitely struck a chord with RPG bloggers.

In the announcement about the launch, Jeff Uurtamo, the programmer and host of the RPGBA site, answers the question “Why do we need another RPG blog network?”:

Even with these features, some will ask why this even required, as there are similar sites out there. To which we say, Yes there are. The issue for me has always been that they just didn’t seem like a community. We wanted to start a community. I wanted something that users could edit their own profile information without an administrator. I wanted simple to use administrator functions. We think we done that.

The RPGBA’s admission requirements are incredibly inclusive: To join, you need to run an RPG blog with an RSS feed, and not be offensive — that’s it. I tend to prefer a slightly more curated approach, but the advantage to the RPGBA’s inclusiveness is that there’s a lot of content for you to peruse, including many excellent blogs.

Inspiration for GMs

My wife, Alysia, and I just finished watching the first season of Game of Thrones, and we both loved the music. The soundtrack is finally available as an MP3 album, and it’s become one of my favorite soundtracks — especially for writing.

It reminds me a lot of Battlestar Galactica, with an orchestra and plenty of drumming, but it’s the strings that really shine in this one. It would make excellent RPG background music. Highly recommended.

With Game of Thrones on the brain, I also dove back into the earlier Song of Ice and Fire books in anticipation of the latest volume, A Dance with Dragons — but before doing that, I polished off the first book in Brandon Sanderson’s new series, The Way of Kings.

I want to mention that book for two reasons. First, because it’s the best fantasy novel I’ve read since A Game of Thrones and the Fellowship of the Ring — it’s really that good. And second, because it makes me want to do some serious worldbuilding like no other book I’ve read in years. Sanderson manages to craft a deeply detailed fantasy world that’s also unique and original, but without the “Ha ha, I just did that to be different!” feel you sometimes get from fantasy books that try to innovate.

Masks Preorders are Now Open

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our latest book for GMs, which is currently available for preorder. If you like the idea of having a thousand system-neutral NPCs at your fingertips, check out Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game.

Not only is the preorder an opportunity to get the hardcover edition of the book, which will not be available in retail stores (retailers will be carrying a softcover edition), but you’ll get the PDF edition for free as soon as you place your preorder.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you like this first entry in Martin’s Mentions, and the new approach!

No, not that kind of Friday. (But now I want to watch that movie again.)

And not the kind where nerds stand outside electronic stores in the wee hours, waiting to buy something that will probably cost less in a couple months, either.

And no, we’re not talking about the kind of Black Friday that leads stockbrokers to autodefenestration. (Although with the state of my portfolio, that might not be a bad idea, if only my broker weren’t on the first floor…)

We’re talking about the annual plethora of sales on role-playing games! And this year, it’s bigger than I’ve ever seen it.

Where to begin? Well, let’s start with something near and dear to my heart, or at least to my dice… Savage Worlds. Reality Blurs is having a 50% off sale, including the already-discounted RunePunk bundle. Other titles: Realms of Cthulhu, Iron Dynasty, and Ravaged Earth. While on their site, check out the Razorwise Report, a wide-ranging blog written by RB’s founder (or possibly Britney’s son).

Keeping in the Savage vein, Silver Gryphon has cut prices on all PDF products through Sunday. ‘Diabolical Traps – Skeletons’? “I’ll buy that for a dollar.”

In the D&D 4E world, Nevermeet Press’ “Brother Ptolemy & The Hidden Kingdom” is on sale – buy the print copy before December, upload a picture of the book to their Facebook page, and get the PDF for free (more details). A somewhat familiar blog posted a favorable review of it here.

Covering everything from 1E to 4E (and more), Goodman Games is selling all of their PDFs at 33% off. Yes, that includes their most-awesome Dungeon Alphabet, and too many categories to list here.

Did someone mention 1E and the retro-clones? Troll Lord Games, publisher of Castles & Crusades, is unleashing Unklar’s Winter Dark upon an unsuspecting public. I’m not sure what that means, aside from 25-50% off all PDFs.

Gun Metal Games is also having a 50% off sale, covering d20 variants, Pathfinder, and even Savage Worlds.

What’s that? You don’t like those games, and want a dark fantasy setting for the Hero system? That’s cool. Kamarathin from d3 Games is half price. Boo-ya!

Looking for a versatile and novel system? Try Silvervine, the creation of our own John Arcadian (and others). It’s half price, and can handle just about any character concept that can be thrown at it. My ‘pirate head on steampunk spider legs, with a six-shooter flintlock’ concept? Check. Patrick’s ‘trash-talking sandwich/attorney, complete with toaster-oven armor plating’ concept? Check.

System neutral you say? There’s no satisfying some people, but perhaps the news that everything from Fat Dragon Games is 15-50% off. Fat Dragon makes those awesome PDF terrain pieces that you know you want. Print, cut, glue, play.

Despite the best efforts of his minions, the Overlord at Tabletop Adventures has survived to mark another birthday, and everything is 20% off in celebration. Tabletop’s motto is “Help for the harried gamemaster”. It’s also an accurate description of their Shards and Bits line of products.

Lest you think only electronic media is on sale, RPG Shop is having their own Black Friday sale. Check it out. Better yet, check out the prices on the Campaign Cartographer add-ons…

Some of these may be duplicates of the above sales, but take a look at everything on sale at Paizo. Notables include 50% off in-stock Green Ronin books, up to 90% off certain Goodman Games titles, and 80% off certain anime titles.

Just like last year, Overstock.com’s RPG section is still overrun with ‘chick-lit’, but there are a few deals to be had for the sharp-eyed. 

And finally, for those of you who barely have enough money to pay attention, there’s plenty of free stuff. I can’t wait to see my players’ reactions when I pull out the Tomb of Horrors Map Set for a ‘normal’ dungeon.

Got more to add? Sound off in the comments and share the love!

The Stew’s first book, Eureka, is currently nominated for a 2010 Golden Geek Award for Best Supplement, which is crazy awesome for a book with barely a quarter of sales under its belt.

Voting for the awards closes 10/31, and if you haven’t voted for Eureka already I’d like to ask you to take a couple of minutes and do just that. Here’s how it works.

You need to be a BoardGameGeek member and meet any one of three criteria: have a supporter badge from any year, have purchased an avatar, or pay a one-time 20 GeekGold fee.

If you don’t meet those criteria, fear not! Gnome Stew reader and BGG admin jmilum offered up the following:

Another way to qualify to vote is to have an avatar, if anyone would like to vote all they need to do is register at the site and send me a geekmail (the internal messaging system at RPG Geek) and I’ll spot you the GeekGold to get an avatar. My username there is jmilum.

The actual voting:

1. Visit the Golden Geek Awards RPG voting page
2. Click on the “Best Supplement” button up top
3. Click on the box to the right of Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters
4. Rate Eureka a “1″ (the highest rating)

Easy-peasy! You just rate Eureka (along with any other nominees you like) and that’s that. There’s no submit button, and your vote will be counted once voting closes.

Thank you very much for voting for us!

Enough preamble– on to the links!

Campaign Structure
There are a lot of interesting ways to look at campaigns (or shorter series of linked games) at the overview level. Recently, I’ve read three very different systems, each of which radically takes on standard roleplaying assumptions, but delivers a game that should be fun and familiar to most players.

Rob Donaghue’s post Rethinking the Campaign offers a very different way to structure a game. If you boil down the best parts of the adventure you want to run, you can probably get it down to a few key scenes. If you frame it like a movie– skipping the boring times in between the scenes, the research and shopping– you can lock into the most satisfying scenes to make a part of your game. His post is a great way to plan out a fun series.

Bryan sent me the Angry DM’s slaughterhouse system of region/campaign building. The system is inspired by zoned video games like Metroid and provides a system to set the GM up with good groups of monsters that make logical encounters. It also provides a mechanism for the adventurers’ actions to influence the world in interesting, measurable ways. It takes upfront work, but gives you a framework to structure improvisation and get solid sandbox play.

Over on Ars Ludi, Ben Robbins has an exciting example of a super hero game that’s set up to work with different players showing up each session. The post is called Crisscrossing Players and Plots and Not Losing Your Mind . It sounds like a lot of work, but the plot grid really helped keep track of it all.

Aligning Player Expectations
Chris Chinn has a good post for you to review before you start your next campaign. Going through the check list makes sure that everyone agrees on more than the game’s title– that you’re all playing the same game– not just “D&D”, but “Hack n’ Slash, victory is everything D&D”. Going through the process ensures the players are all on the same page– that you don’t have one player expecting a lot of intrigue while the other just wants to hack.

Judd has an example of group alignment from his recent play. Your view of the Forgotten Realms might be entirely different depending on your first portal to the Forgotten Realms: whether you started with the computer games, the gray box, the FRCG, or some other source book. By ensuring that everyone shared the same approach to the Realms, they were able to share the excitement of seeing the same NPCs in the game world. With a misalignment in portals, you various players might wait impatiently for beloved NPC to make it into the game… and being disappointed when it turned out that the GM never shared the portal anchoring your view of the world.

Ben Robbins explains how to pitch your game so you’re all on the same page: saying Let’s play Star*Axe and describing the fiction doesn’t get everyone aligned. Instead, your pitch needs to include any key deviations from your group’s roleplaying expectations, or you risk disconnect– or the feeling of betrayal at the “bait and switch”.

D&D Tools and Resources
Dizzy Dragon’s adventure generator is a very cool random dungeon generator. You can toggle the settings so it makes a map matching the first edition DMG, or tweak settings to make it come out matching other patterns. It has an old school lean, but you can use it for just the map, descriptions, or whatever component you’d like to save time on.

Peter S prepared and shared a few inspirational phrases for fantasy combat, so you’re not just “bloodied” all the time in his post I’m Hurt Doc!.

I love the use of Secret Missions in this post. It presents a cool tool for engaging players and tailoring goals to reward “stretching” play.

These dungeon tile pictures a great for IDing what’s inside each set. They’re deliberately too coarse to print, but very handy for figuring out which set to grab for that ruined tower…

Newbie DM’s condition cards for 4e (pdf) is a great thing that makes the game a little smoother at the table.

I wish I’d seen the Dingles Games website some time ago– the NPC generator does a great job of cutting down the tedium of generating NPCs in D&D 3.5, including adding levels to any of the monster manual critters. It’s handy for people running pathfinder these days too… [Found via 6d6 fireball.]

This is out of date, but it can still be handy– if a bit slow loading. The Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Tile Mapper does a nice job of providing the various terrain tiles from the first few sets. It’s easy to make a quick and beautiful little map, though the commands can be a little mouse heavy.

Dresden Files (and FATE generally)
I currently reading the Dresden Files RPG, working on a review that should go up sometime in September. The books are huge, so I can tell you it won’t be coming at the beginning of the month…

This RPG.net thread covers the basics of the Dresden Files game. It’s more of a “what is it?” thread than anything else– good for initial research.

For a great overview of the Dresden Files RPG, look at their downloads. The links include Harry Dresden’s character sheet– so if you know what he’s like from the books, you’ll quickly figure out how the system corresponds. There’s also quite a bit more– a sample chapter showing city creation and the powers list. It’s rounded off by the traditional PDF character, city, and quick reference sheets.

No matter what FATE game you’re running, inspiration for consequences and aspects is very handy. This list is perfect for Diaspora, but most of the examples would work out great in any FATE game, including Dresden.

And you?

What cool sites have you stumbled on recently? Have you read anything that’s inspired a different way of looking at GMing? A different way of handling NPCs, setting up plot arcs for the PCs, or anything else that other GMs would love to see? Please share your finds in comments!

If you wrote or read something you’d like to see featured here, drop us a line. There’s some awesome stuff for GMs out there, and we love to share.

Technique: It’s all in how you use it…

Collaborative conflict mapping is a technique that draws players into the GM’s sketch of the situation and encourages them to expand on it, ties themselves to it, and make it their own.
The same page tool: a quick worksheet (or test) to ensure that you and your players are all playing the same game.
A cool way to work around untimely deaths: cheating death, from Fantasy Craft.
Without rhyme or reason: games as brain teasers.
Adapting burning wheel beliefs to 4e and other games.
Say yes is great advice, but saying no clearly can be great for a game and a world. It’s all in how you hear it.
Fluency play: adding new elements as you master old ones, to keep people from throwing their hands up at complexity.

Worldbuilding: How many universes have disco?

From Inkwell Ideas: Ten ways to vary your game world’s cultures. Combine that with his reminder that cultures and national borders often don’t match, and you’ve got a solid start.
Heroquest 2: Community resources part one and part two. Quantify a community’s needs and requirements, and you have an engine for adventure that fits your world organically.
Does your world have a common language? Why?
Like Greywulf, build a better world by narrowing the options a bit. Rob Donoghue’s has a similar take in 4e and me.
A review of Hard Boiled Cultures.
A solar system physics model. Mostly a pretty distraction, but it could be so much more. Check out your trinary star system and see if it’s going to crash together or last millennia.

4e for fun and profit

The best 4e fights feature these things: a great summary by Judd, from a Story Games thread.
A nice cursed weapon implementation. It turns cursed items into more a one-shot trap and “ug, get rid of it”– they’re useful, just risky or barbed.
From boardgamegeek: A Cool D&D playmat. I’m tempted to bring the mat and a heap of beads to keep track of hit points on the mat next session. Tempted… but I’m not sold yet.
iplay4e is a site that stores your characters online, accessible to the group. Characters can be grouped by campaigns, making it easy for the GM keep track of the character items and bonuses.
NPCs ready for play. All of the PB1 and PB2 races and classes, plus additional MM1 races, with two builds at every level are represented.
Five steps to encourage rituals in skill challenges.
Gamefiend has some good advice for spicing up solos, based on interpreting the fun of MMO bosses. It was inspired by Rob Donoghue’s “raids” in 4e series: 1, 2, and 3.

Other D&D:
Want to play D&D with your young kid? Try monster slayers for kids 6+.
Playing Pathfinder: a happy story of a group playing together, lured by fun and nostalgia.
Time to get aligned? A Toothpaste for Dinner comic.
(Living Arcanis site undergoing redesign, currently inaccessible:) 29 free modules for 3.5: the old Living Arcanis modules freely released.

Modern Adventure Seeds

Is this sabotage or civic work? Secret restoration projects. It’s easy to imagine a cabal of supernatural creatures trying to repair the forgotten defenses just ahead of the long slumbering threat’s arrival.
Ten cinematic chase scenes on foot, for inspiration. Lots of details that you can work in to make your next chase more dynamic.

Good for your indie cred

Burning Wheel:
Fight, a guide to strategy for burning wheel. I plan on printing this out before I head to my first burning wheel session at GenCon.
How scripting Duels of Wits and Fights can build the fiction in Burning Wheel.
The Burning Wheel Lifepath Browser. Designed to save page flipping and streamline character generation. Stick around and look at some of the characters others have designed.

Mouseguard:
The Chatty DM tries out Mouseguard. Session one, two, and three, and four.
MJ Harnish plays Mouseguard with kids: An awesome seven part series.
Doyce reviews and plays mouse guard.

Other cool games:
The Dresden Files RPG is out for preorder. Visit their site for lots of material from the books, including a long sample chapter. I will be picking this up…
The Riddle of Steel: a warm look at a book I never read. It always sounded interesting– I wish it had made it up to the top of my list at some point.
Judd brags about Misery Bubblegum.
The new Warhammer Fantasy is very different from the last edition, but sounds cool in a whole new way. Have any of you tried it?
More microlite20 worlds than you can shake a stick at. No, really a lot.
Now that I’m playing in an Aces and Eights game, I’d like to read about it on the web. The best place I’ve found is the kenzerco forums. It’s like a ghost town elsewhere. If you know of a good site for Aces and Eights, please share!

If you like bite-sized GMing tips and ideas, don’t miss Gnome Stew’s Twitter feed (@gnomestew).

If you have interesting links to share, please add them in comments. Whether they’re cool things you’ve written or cool things you’ve found, the world needs good links!

Gnome Rodeos are the Stew’s periodic link roundups — articles packed with pointers to excellent GMing material we think you’ll enjoy.

If you wrote or read something you’d like to see featured here, drop us a line. There’s some awesome stuff for GMs out there, and we love to share.

GMing Regulars

Roleplaying Tips: On-The-Fly GMing Tips is full of good suggestions, like having “adventure ingredients” on hand and giving the BBEG a plan. Also, advice on making equipment interesting through cultural markers and regional differences; I have a special place in my heart for this level of detail when it comes to gear. The previous issue offers up 9 Things Dragon Age Taught Me About Running a Better Game; if you like that, you might also enjoy my own 9 Lessons GMs Can Learn from World of Warcraft from a few years back.

Dungeon Mastering: Haunted House: 4 Tips To Terrify Your Players is quite good (especially this: take out the combat), and Learning from the DM to the Stars! — which is full of tips from Chris Perkins, D&D’s Story Manager — is fantastic.

Musings of the Chatty DM: Friday Chat: Zen and the Art of Dodging Dead Ends is fun: “When failure is not an option in a scene, don’t roll any dice” vs. “Failure should always be an option.” Also, in case you hadn’t heard, Chatty is considering a merger with Critical Hits, which sounds like an excellent idea.

Technically This Is Like Time Travel, Because I Sometimes Sit On Links for Awhile

The Why of Worldbuilding: Berin Kinsman (who launched Role Play Media Network last year) applies the “why technique” — keep asking “Why?” to force yourself to delve deeper into something — to worldbuilding. For example: “You meet in a tavern. Why? Why are these people in a tavern? Do they live nearby, and this is the local hangout? Is this where real adventurers hang out, and these wannabees are hoping to score some action? Why this tavern? Why not another one? Is this taven in a city, a village, a waypoint along a trade route?” It’s an excellent article.

Vignettes: A Role-Playing Tool: Lebkin’s take on using vignettes when designing adventures: “These small, relatively self-contained, set pieces. The idea is to create interest experiences that are not necessarily tied to a specific story progression. These are items floating within the balloon, ready to shape the path as needed.” Dovetails nicely with our own John Arcadian’s Island Design Theory.

Reverse geocache puzzle: Great concept and an excellent RPG idea: the mystery box only opens in a specific location. (Thanks, Kurt!)

Game Book Review: The Radical’s Handbook: If FFG’s new Dark Heresy RPG gives you a thundering boner, you’ll likely enjoy John W.S. Marvin’s take on the Radical’s Handbook.

Rewarding Roleplaying PDF: Available for free by signing up for Spes Magna’s mailing list, I’ve read this PDF and found it quite enjoyable. It reminds me of Burning Wheel’s Artha system, which is a very good thing. In a nutshell: RR creates a system-neutral mechanic whereby players set their own roleplaying goals, and are rewarded for meeting them during play.

Year of the Dungeon: This blog by the always-excellent Tony Dowler is simply the shit: tiny dungeons with clever, funny drawings, posted regularly for your enjoyment for the next several months (at least). Don’t miss Tony’s How to Host a Dungeon, either.

Making more dramatic scenes: This article recommends pretending you have a little GM inside your head asking you to describe what you’re doing while you play. Maybe don’t do this in public, but apart from that it’s a stellar idea; I personally am terrible at doing this kind of stuff as a player.

Dear God What Have We Wrought?!: DGWHWW?! is a new gaming blog — try his impassioned look at immersion in RPGs as a starting point.

…and if you like bite-sized GMing tips and ideas, don’t miss Gnome Stew’s Twitter feed (@gnomestew).

Newbie DM, author of the killer blog of the same name, Newbie DM, emailed me about his latest project: an ultra-light mini-RPG geared towards 4- and 5-year-olds.

You can read about his system and download the free three-page PDF on his blog. The PDF includes character sheets.

The system itself is essentially mechanics for combat that turn it into a fun counting exercise for kids — you grab some minis, a dungeon tile or three, and improvise a story. If you’re not good at improvising stories for your kids, you’re probably reading the wrong blog…

I have a 10-month-old, and my wife and I are both creative people; I’d say there’s a better than average chance our daughter will want to try RPGs. When she’s ready for a full-fledged system, I’ll be introducing her to Mouse Guard (read my review to see why) — but before she reaches that point, something like Newbie’s game would be perfect.

Thanks for sharing this with the GMing community, Newbie!

So, Gnome Stew Readers…

Do you run games for your kids? What system do you use? What have you learned about how to make gaming fun for them?

Well, I say “we.”

While we all winnowed down the list, someone else actually created the graphical versions (my good friend Darren, who did our site design) — and the slacker who sat on this project for a shamefully long time?

That was me, not “we,” and I’m sorry it took me so long!

But here we are: 33 new taglines have been added to the original 19, and are now in the rotation. Every time you load a page on the Stew, a random tagline appears.

Thank you to everyone who suggested a tagline during the contest — and to save you from frantically refreshing this page to see what’s new, here’s a list of the new additions:

Available with Constitution or Charisma.
Hey baby, want to see my lair?
Short in stature. Tall in game mastering content.
Chock full of GMing advice (and gnome chunks).
Fortified by thousands of essential reader comments.
94% lean USDA-certified GMing advice, 6% gnomish gristle.
Good for what ails your game.
Choosy GMs choose Gnome Stew.
Add flavor to your games with a mouthful of hot gnome.
Because we couldn’t get “Gnome Custard” past our brand manager.
Better ingredients, better GMing.
The best recipe for game mastering.
Stewing ideas (and gnome gizzards) for better GMing.
Now 100% dwarf-free.*
Many, many gnomes were harmed in the making of this stew.
Ask us about the special ingredient! (Hint: it’s gnome.)
Guaranteed not to give you Dwarf Pox.
Hot GM-on-GM action.
Hot gnome photos uploaded rarely. Very, very rarely.
Made from the finest all-natural GMing advice.
In no way part of a balanced breakfast.
Guaranteed to help you roll more criticals behind the screen.
Bearded for your GMing pleasure.
Let cool, then serve over dice.
Epic-level GMing advice from 0-level monsters.
Making pointy red hats cool since 2008.
Our stew has what plants crave. (GMs love it, too.)

We picked our favorite reader taglines, sometimes as-is and sometimes with a change or two, and always with an eye to capturing that lemony zest that somehow says “Gnome Stew.” (We also added a few of our own, which I won’t post here — we have to have some surprises, right?)

As with all of the little quirks of this site, I hope you enjoy this one.

Gnome Rodeos are the Stew’s periodic link roundups — articles packed with pointers to excellent GMing material we think you’ll enjoy.

If you wrote or read something you’d like to see featured on the Stew, drop us a line. There’s some awesome stuff for GMs out there, and we love to share.

GMing Regulars

Roleplaying Tips: RPT issue #465 features four tips for simple culture creation. Number one is “Struggles and losses become fears,” and number two is “Villains become archetypes of what’s evil.” If had to guess what the tips would be, those wouldn’t have been my guesses — and damn, but these are some good tips! Prepare to be surprised by an interesting perspective on culture-building.

Dungeon Mastering: The one-shot session success formula (item #1: isolation) is excellent, as is Big Bad Good Guy… Wait, What? — think of an imperial navy, which is one of the examples in the article. Solid stuff.

Musings of the Chatty DM: Chatty’s last Friday Chat, Are you a backseat GM? resonated with me — when you’re used to GMing, it’s tough not to do this!

You Other Gnomes Can’t Deny

Rogue Trader RPG review: Gnome Stew reader John W.S. Marvin emailed me about his review, and it’s a good one. If you’re curious about the RT RPG, start here.

WotC’s D&D 4e hotline: Last week, WotC ran a hotline for GMs for several hours a day, and said expert GMs would be standing by to take your calls. I believe it was free, and from the Facebook updates I saw all week, well-received. Did you call? If not, what might prompt you to call?

The Anarchist Gamemaster Cookbook: Fresh on the heels of Tracy Hickman’s XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery is a new GMing book from a different publisher, Sinister Adventures. Like XDM, it’s got a theme of sorts (or maybe “attitude” would be a better descriptor): “Peer into Nicolas Logue’s demented mind and taste his darkest sanity-shattering gamemaster tricks from a decade teaching theater in NYC, China and London. These forbidden fruits come screaming through the interwebs straight to your home gaming table.” The list of topics looks solid. It drops in March 2010, and if you buy the print version you get the PDF for free, which is always neat.

RPG Blog 2′s special deals: RPG blogger and friend of the Stew Zachary Houghton lined up exclusive discounts and special offers with several great publishers, and there’s still some time left to cash in. I recommend checking out Kobold Quarterly, which is 50% off while the deal lasts.

Gnome Rodeos are the Stew’s periodic link roundups — articles packed with pointers to excellent GMing material we think you’ll enjoy.

If you wrote or read something you’d like to see featured here, drop us a line. There’s some awesome stuff for GMs out there, and we love to share.

The Lucky Tagline Contest Winner

Without further ado, the winner of our tagline contest is: Gnome Stew reader BladeMaster0182. Congrats, BladeMaster0182!

Your copy of The Encountered: Volume 1, the second book for Mind Storm Labs‘ Alpha Omega RPG, will be on its way to you shortly.

A big thank you to everyone who entered the contest and contributed taglines — we got some excellent submissions. The gnomes will be voting on our favorites (and adding a few of our own), and they should start appearing on the site before too long.

GMing Regulars

Roleplaying Tips: It’s tough to argue with adventure design tips from Wolfgang Baur and Open Design contributor Brandon Hodge, so I won’t. From Wolfgang: “The key element is to get the good ideas (and the bad ones) down while they’re fresh, and then shape them as you find time to think them through.”

Dungeon Mastering: Want to write or draw for Dungeon Mastering? Yax and the gang are hiring. It’s been fascinating and instructive to watch DMing.com’s transformation from D&D blog to e-tool developer/publisher/paid mentor — what Yax has done with the site over the past couple of years is pretty amazing.

Musings of the Chatty DM: Phil has been reviewing Tracy Hickman’s XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, a GMing tome that came out around GenCon: part one, part two. To call this review extensive would be an understatement — I believe there are two more parts still to come!

Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinks

Character concept generator: Chris Chinn, who writes Deeper in the Game, is one sharp dude — and I love his recent musings on character creation. In addition to the generator (which I found helpful in creating a recent PC, as it pointed me in a new direction), he’s also had clever stuff to say about casting PCs as an ensemble. (Also: part two.)

Yog-Sothoth fundraiser: YSDC — a familiar site to just about any CoC GM — is having a fundraiser to buy a 3D camera, which they plan to use to bring you nifty 3D projects. They developed the Lovecraftian Tales from the Table DVD, so you know they’ll deliver. As a bonus, they’re also running an auction for a drool-worthy leatherbound edition of the excellent Trail of Cthulhu RPG.

Ecology of the Deva (D&DI login required): I normally wouldn’t post a link that requires a login (you’ll need a D&D Insider subscription for this one), but it’s an excellent article that I found quite useful when trying to grok one of 4e’s cooler races, the endlessly-reincarnated ex-angel deva. It also made me think about the online-only versions of Dragon and Dungeon in a different light.

While I definitely miss the print editions — which I grew up with, and which are a lot easier to read during my morning constitutional — it was very handy to be able to hit that link, print out one article, read it, and know that I didn’t have to shelve month after month of magazines for one piece of timely content. I’m still mulling that one over.

Tucker’s Kobolds: If you weren’t reading Dragon back in the late ’80s and early ’90s (this editorial is from 1987), you may not have heard of Tucker’s Kobolds — and you owe it to yourself to check out this site. It’s a straight-up reposting of the original TC editorial, and will give you an entirely different perspective on one of old-school D&D’s wimpier races, force multipliers, and the deviousness you can get up to as a GM. (Via The Labyrinth.)

And to close out, delicious gnome stew, as seen on the menu at a restaurant in Barcelona. Thanks to Gnome Stew reader Lord Inar for forwarding this to us.