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
Having no intention of running a game in 2012, I did not craft an entry for our New Year, New Game event -- hopefully you did! -- so imagine my surprise walking out of last week’s game discussion with a new campaign to plan. Did I mention it’s based on a licensed property that I’m only passingly familiar with and two players who dwarf my knowledge? Oh, and ...
This article was written for the first annual New Year, New Game blog carnival hosted by Gnome Stew as part of the 2012 NYNG challenge.
This past weekend I wrapped up a 16-month Star Trek campaign, and ending it (always a tricky affair) made me think about how I started it -- which in turn seemed like a pretty good topic to cover for NYNG.
I'm going to talk specifics ...
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 ...
Arrr, ye fair and gentle readers. Ye be knowing what today be, donch'a? Why of course it be International Talk Like A Pirate Day. That be meaning we ought to be talking about, and like, Pirates. Well ole redbeard Johnny has a small treat for ya. In honor of the day, I'll be dropping some nuggets o'wisdom on how to make your game a little more piratical. ...
Martin's note: This is the 1,000th article on Gnome Stew! We went live on May 12, 2008; here are our initial welcome article and all of our launch day articles. Thank you for reading the Stew, spreading the word, and supporting the site for the past three years! We love sharing GMing advice and we love our readers -- happy gaming to you all!
And now, on to today's ...
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 ...
So stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
A Dragonblooded paladin who is trying to make a more noble name for his people, a shadowy thief/assassin Eladrin kicked out of his people for his devious ways, a high ranking human cleric of pelor fresh from the convent, and a tiefling warlock with a dark past walk into a tavern where a man in a corner gives them a ...
Most editions of D&D have featured a spell called speak with dead (which I'll call Speak with Dead for readability) that allows the caster to, for the span of a brief conversation, talk to a corpse.
In D&D, it's a pretty minor spell -- cool, but it's got nothing on flinging fireballs and waving around your finger of death.
Except here's the thing: Speak with Dead would change the world.
And ...
My planning cycles for my current game are, for me, pretty short -- usually one week. That's actually a good thing, because it forces me to focus on the important stuff and helps me avoid getting bogged down in crap that won't hit the table, but it does mean that I'll take all the help I can get.
One thing I find helpful is having a list of adventure ...
Mashing genres can be a fun way to put a fresh spin on a new campaign. It allows you to to draw upon tropes and plots from one genre and give them a new "desktop theme." When I started this series of articles I planned on keeping to the hypothetical, but as it turns out I began a new campaign last weekend that is a genre mash-up.
At the risk ...
Back in January, I wrote about using PC backgrounds as a campaign roadmap, and I've been putting a version of that concept into practice in my current Star Trek game. It's been fun and it's saved me time, so I thought it might be useful to you.
Specifically, I used a version of the Three Things approach created by the Stew's own Don Mappin: I asked my players for ...
When I think back over 20-plus years as a gamer, only a few gaming products have ever felt truly magical to me. Two, to be precise.
Oh, there have been LOTS of standouts -- awesome products that have given me years of enjoyment and shaped how I game, and, by extension, that have played a role in making some of my best memories with friends.
Which is a pretty fucking ...
Along with DNAphil, I've recently switched to using a template for my session prep. Phil uses a template he created; I'm using the one from the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator's Guide.
The Trek RPG template is really two templates: an outline for the episode (adventure) as a whole, which follows the three-act model common to Star Trek and many, many other TV shows (and movies, and books, and ...
Martin's excellent article on episodic gameplay made me think about my own episodic campaigns. For many of the reasons he outlined, I've found episodic campaigns to be a fun way to run a game and I've run several successful ones.
That said there were a number of pitfalls that I've encountered along the way, and some of these did derail episodic campaigns. I thought it might be a good idea ...
My group is three sessions into a Star Trek series with me in the GM's chair, and last night's episode cemented one of the things I like most about running this game: the episodic structure.
I've played episodic games before (notably Stargate) and enjoyed them, but until now I'd never run one. There are different ways to approach them (and the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator's Guide offers excellent ...
