| May 6, 2013 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
Back in the earliest incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons there was a player defined as the “Caller.” In addition to playing her own character, the Caller had the job of collecting all of the other players’ decisions in a round and communicating them to the GM. While this made sense in large games with 20+ players, it seems a little ridiculous when there’s only five people around the table. For my groups “Caller” was merely the D&D term for the party leader in-character. Still, I sometimes…
| May 3, 2013 | Posted by Guest Author |
Today’s guest article is by Christopher M. Sniezak, the producer and host of The Misdirected Mark Podcast, one of the movers behind the Queen City Conquest gaming convention, who is slowly building up writing credits in the gaming and fiction industry. He believes you should try every game you can so you can figure out what you actually enjoy. Thanks, Chris! I think presentation is king, be it at the table or in the rulebook you’re reading. When it comes to playing at the table…
| May 2, 2013 | Posted by Scott Martin |
Last time, we talked about The Invisible World; a world that has grown so familiar that it goes unnoticed. This time we’ll talk about one of my favorite setting tropes, The Hidden World. The hidden world setting is often a world that begins by modeling the world around us, but adds a concealed truth. There are levels and levels of hidden worlds; sometimes the secrets are literally unknown worlds (like the hollow earth popular in pulp novels–a great place to stash your dinosaurs), others feature…
| April 30, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Microscope is a superb game in its own right, and one I recommend without reservation, but it also features two things that you can easily make use of in other games: collaborative setting creation and its yes/no list. Collaborative setting creation is the point of Microscope; it’s the whole game. When you play Microscope, you build a setting and its history together in a unique and fascinating way. After two sessions, when my group wrapped up a game bracketed by humanity’s first contact with aliens…
| April 30, 2013 | Posted by Martin Ralya |
Gnome Stew won the 2013 RPG Site of the Year award! Many thanks to you, our readers, who voted for us in the nomination round! Your voting efforts got us nominated last year as well, but the judges chose a different winner. Winning this year’s SOTY award was a fantastic surprise — and a one-time event, as winners aren’t eligible in future years. I encourage you to check out the other four SOTY finalists: Kobold Press, G*M*S Magazine, Age of Ravens, and Nearly Enough Dice.…
| April 23, 2013 | Posted by Walt Ciechanowski |
It’s funny how, as a roleplayer, it’s easy to become a creature of habit. If I rolled back time a decade, I’d find that I’m still following the same gaming schedule, I still have the same gamer friends and I buy my gaming stuff and reading material from the same FLGS. These things survived my growing family (in 2003, my wife and I were married a year; now we have 3 children), career changes, and new mailing addresses. If anything, my regular gaming habit actually…
| April 22, 2013 | Posted by Don Mappin |
You’ve no doubt heard — or uttered — the phrase that “no adventure survives contact with the players.” The argument being that even the best GM cannot possibly account for all the permutations that players come up with. Typically the bonzo, crazy ideas that come from out of nowhere (“I steal his pants”) are the ones that make us shake our head, pause for a moment, and then pick up the pieces. But this isn’t about handling those types of plans, it’s the opposite: the…
