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
Legend is a reimplementation of the d20 System core rules from Rule of Cool -- a d20 fantasy RPG that does things differently. It's as much of a change from core d20 as d20 Modern was from D&D 3.0.
Through January 14, 2012, it's available for a pay-what-you-like donation to Child's Play. If you have the slightest interest in d20, it's well worth checking out (see my recent post ...
A few years ago, I ran a home-brewed fantasy campaign using the Iron Heroes system. I fell in love with the setting that my players and I created, and for the past few months have been toying with the idea of bringing it back, but not with the same mechanics. The more I looked at the setting, I started to realize that different game systems could be used ...
Luke Crane, the creator of the Burning Wheel RPG and one of the best GMs I've ever gamed with, often does something very clever for convention games: He runs replayable scenarios.
"Replayable" as in, even if you've played the exact same event before, it will be dramatically different -- but just as fun -- every time.
That sounds like a pretty handy thing for a GM to have on hand, ...
While I love the creative and storytelling aspects of being a GM, also I love the mechanical aspects of games. In my downtime from running games and stirring the Stew, I read a lot of rulebooks, many for games I am not planning to run, just to read about different mechanics. I love to see how different designers handle skill checks, car chases, or character growth. With my ...
I first heard about the Mouse Guard RPG at GenCon 2007, when I stopped by the Archaia Studios Press booth to buy a couple of Artesia T-shirts. On the table was a small placard announcing that a Mouse Guard game, designed by Luke Crane, was "coming soon."
I perked up for four reasons. One, I like Mouse Guard, the comic by David Petersen upon which the RPG is based. ...
When you get right down to it, what is an RPG? It's an engine for making interesting decisions.
When your players are playing in your campaign, at the most basic level they're doing one of two things: making decisions, or having stuff happen to their characters. Stuff happening to their characters is by far the less interesting of the two -- it's the decision-making that really matters.
Game Mechanics and ...
