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
A couple of weeks ago I was at a convention and got to jump into a game of Apocalypse World. Definitely an interesting system with some unique elements and ideas, but one of the things that struck me most about it was a very non-unique element – something I remember doing a long time ago and that somehow slipped out of my library of gaming tools. It was ...
We've mentioned that we're working on our second book a few times over the past several months, but our secretive gnomish nature has kept us from releasing any details -- until now!
GenCon event listings came out over the weekend, and eagle-eyed Gnome Stew readers may already have spotted this listing:
SEM1123263
Meet the Gnomes Behind the Engine!
Come and meet some of the gnomes behind the ENnie Award-winning blog Gnome Stew! ...
When I'm not sitting behind a screen or writing Gnome Stew articles, I'm also an RPG freelance writer. That means that my weekly group usually gets dragged into whatever I need to playtest for my projects, the latest of which is Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space.
Running a playtest is like running a one-shot. The players are only going to be playing a short while and it's often ...
I'm a big proponent of using everything my players give me, especially when it comes to PC backgrounds: If you put it in there, I assume it's because you want to see it in the game, and I'll do my best to make that happen.
But why assume?
As a player, I design character backgrounds this way. I include NPCs my PC would love to fight, fuck, or otherwise interact ...
There are many ways to build a good character, but one aspect that often gets overlooked -- or conversely, over-worked -- is motivations.
If you know what motivates a character -- PC or NPC -- you can extrapolate a lot of other things on the fly.
The trick is not to make your motivators too broad or too focused. Too broad, and they're meaningless ("She's motivated by a desire to ...
When was the last time your players actually talked to an NPC? Was it a rewarding conversation, or was the NPC made out of cardboard? Or, on the flip side, have you been yearning to have a session where the players do something other than kill people, but the numbers are the only part of the character that they've bothered to flesh out? Fear not-- a lot of ...
I love names.
As a player, naming my character is one of my favorite aspects of character creation. It usually shakes out one of two ways:
I hit on the perfect name right away and it instantly helps me define the character. Sometimes this comes at the end of the process, sometimes at the start (it's better at the start).
I agonize over choosing a name. I try real names, random ...
With D&D 4e out (and looking awesome so far), I wanted to start building a collection of prepainted fantasy minis for future use. While I plan to buy some boosters as well, I figured I'd kick things off by ordering a host of cheap minis for representing PCs. Even if creatures get counters instead, it's always cool when the PCs have their own minis.
Back when I was collecting ...
