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
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 ...
Back before Gencon, Phil threw out an article asking for Gnome Stew fans to pick games for us to pick up and review. Phil reviewed Vornheim – The Complete City Kit and I am now reviewing Microscope. We got no compensation or free copies for these games. I take a long time to do my reviews, mostly because I want to get deeply into what I’m reviewing ...
This year for the annual You Pick It, I Review It , you selected Vornheim: The Complete City Kit. I ventured to GenCon, and in the first hour of the dealer’s floor opening I had this small book in my hands. Now after returning from GenCon, recovering from the Con Crud, and taking care of a few other books that had to get read first (prep for a ...
Just before Gencon, Charles Ryan of Cubicle 7 shot an invite to the Gnomes to come by the booth and talk with the designers of The One Ring. We shot a couple of potential questions back and forth and I decided to haul along my video equipment to see if we could get the interview on tape. More than just get an interview though, Charles comped me a ...
A while back (quite a while back actually) I was given a complimentary PDF copy of Courts of the Shadow Fey for review purposes. The concept was interesting and I was looking for an excuse to get my group to give 4th ed. D&D a valid try. My goal was to give the mini-campaign a decent play test. Sadly, before my group could get familiar enough with 4th ...
For those long-time readers of the Stew, this is a tradition that I have had a lot of fun doing the past two Gen Con’s. It is the 3rd annual You Pick It, I Review It event. This is where you get to put the last item on my Gen Con shopping list before I pack up and head to Indy for the best 4 days in gaming.
In ...
From the moment I read the Fiasco rules (link and link) I knew that there was something special about this game. Within its short 135 pages was a game of pure brilliance, finely tuned to a specific type of play and yet structured to allow for nearly unlimited re-playability. While I have enjoyed playing Fiasco numerous times over the last year, my inner game designer has been curious ...
Before I get to the the review, I need to tell you my feelings about ham.
Trust me. There is a point to this.
I do not like ham. Never have. I like bacon, pork chops, and pork roast, but I have never liked ham. I cannot blame this on ham though, because this is a matter of my personal tastes. You can serve a world class Virginia smoked ham ...
This time last year, I had a chance to review and play, my favorite game for 2010, Fiasco (here and here). A few weeks later, I had a chance to talk to Fiasco’s author, Jason Morningstar. Last week, I saw a tweet that said a new Fiasco book, the Fiasco Companion, was in production. With obvious excitement I shot off an email to Jason, and he not only ...
This review has been a long time in the coming. I’ve had both of these books on my shelf for a while* and I’ve been sitting on doing the review for no real particular reason. Neither of these books were comp copies and this review is unsolicited. These are just two products that I’ve had for a while and wanted to review.
Ok, lets talk about the books, and ...
So imagine this situation, it is about 1 day until game time and your encounter with the BBEG or a very important plot piece or fight is slated to happen in the next game. Unfortunately, the characters aren't quite ready to take it on or the player who has backstory hooks isn't going to be there. Darnit, what do you do? The obvious answer is to stall ...
If you are like me you are always looking for new material to inject into your games. The more versatile the source material the better, and Brother Ptolemy & The Hidden Kingdom is just that: versatile source material that you can easily plug into your current campaign. The Hidden Kingdom is the first print offering from Nevermet Press and according to the press release for the product’s launch ...
“Life is like a box of ammo.” – Duke Nukem At Con on the Cob (about which much more later), I ran across one of the cooler props I’ve seen in the last year (including Gen Con). These are the AmmoCounters from Das Spiel Unker (a German pun for ‘The Basement Gamer’). Some background: In addition to RPGs (and parentheses), I ...
After seeing a preview of Outbreak: Undead (warning: has sound) online, and then again at GenCon, I knew I wanted to review this game for the Stew. I love zombies, horror, survival horror, and all the intersections thereof, and Outbreak: Undead (OU) is a zombie survival horror RPG -- right up my alley.
It's also an "avatar game," an RPG in which you play a character based on yourself ...
Filling the Empty Chair is a PDF resource designed to help gamers find people to play with. Written by Johnn Four, the the editor of Roleplaying Tips, it combines player-finding advice with freely-available information. It's a 30-page PDF available for download from RoleplayingTips.com for $7.
This is a review of Version 1.03. As the back of the book indicates, this is a "living document" and may be updated as ...
