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
Here's one way that you can tell that our first annual New Year, New Game challenge had some excellent entries: After the first round of secret ballot voting for our favorites, there was a three-way tie. We broke that tie with a runoff vote between those three entries.
Because we received over 50 entries in the contest -- the threshold for awarding a second prize -- we'll be giving ...
Gnome Stew's first annual New Year, New Game (NYNG) contest and blog carnival both end January 23, a bit less than a week away.
The contest features a grand prize worth over $150, courtesy of our four sponsors: DriveThruRPG, Engine Publishing, Obsidian Portal, and Tabletop Adventures. You can enter it right here on the Stew.
The NYNG blog carnival, also hosted here, is themed around running new games -- tips, ...
Welcome to the first annual New Year, New Game challenge!
New Year, New Game (NYNG for short) is a new Gnome Stew venture -- an annual challenge to GMs all over the world: Run a new game this year.
New Year, New Game is an idea that we hope will catch on with gamers all over the world, much like GM’s Day did (it’s celebrated on March 4th every year). ...
Welcome to 2012! Before we all get exploded by the Mayan apocalypse (save for those lucky few who get saved by John Cusack driving a succession of improbably durable vehicles), why not take part in a GMing challenge?
Or better yet, a challenge that's also a contest where you can win cool things?
Or even better still, a challenge that's also a contest and our first-ever blog carnival?
The first stop ...
There were many fine entries, but Gnome Stew reader ManiacClown is the winner with his brilliant mash up of holiday cheer and cold war espionage in this gem of a comment:
Kris “Santa” Sinterklaas is many things. Among them is an international criminal mastermind, kept alive on a life-extending alchemical mixture. For centuries he has schemed to bring the world under his jolly boots of doom, earning the trust ...
Would your group play in a session that had Santa Claus in it? Sure, you can write off the legend of Santa Claus as nothing more than a myth used for entertaining children with, but let’s look at some of the finer details:
He has an arctic base of operations.
He passes judgment on others and decides whether or not to reward or punish them for their deeds.
He has an ...
We had 65 entries in our guess how ancient the gnomes are contest, with the largest prize we've ever offered up for grabs: a $103 Amazon.com gift certificate.
There were a lot of guesses in the right ballpark, as well as a few folks who thought we were all 12 years old (or didn't read the whole contest article, which included a "floor" number) -- and many more folks ...
The Stew turns three today, and we're celebrating with a contest: Guess how old the gnomes are -- in days -- and win a $103 Amazon.com gift certificate!
This contest is a way to say thank you to our readers, both old and new, and hopefully have a bit of fun at the same time. Without you, we'd be writing Gnome Stew articles for our cats and pet kobolds, ...
To celebrate opening preorders for our book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters (now available as a PDF, DRM-free and fully bookmarked and hyperlinked, for $16.95), we held a dice contest that ended last week.
The goal was to be the reader who came the closest to guessing the total of a roll of 1,414 dice (which I made on camera, viewable here) without going over.
The lucky/math-savant ...
Preorders for Gnome Stew's first book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, are now open:
Preorder Eureka now in the Engine Publishing online store!
Featuring a foreword by gaming industry legend Monte Cook, Eureka contains 501 complete adventure plots usable with almost any roleplaying game, plus GMing advice and tools for making the most of every plot.
Each plot includes a hook to draw your players in, an outline ...
Gnome Rodeos are the Stew's periodic link roundups -- articles packed with pointers to excellent GMing material we think you'll enjoy.
We usually feature a few regulars plus our favorite discoveries from around the web, all with an eye to making your time behind the screen easier and more fun.
If you wrote or read something you'd like to see featured here, drop us a line. There's some awesome stuff ...
This is Gnome Stew's 500th article, and we thought to ourselves, "What better way to ring in 500 than with a contest?"
But first, THANK YOU for reading, commenting, linking, and spreading the word about Gnome Stew. We love writing the Stew, and we're thrilled at how well the site has been received by GMs all over the world -- and how much mileage you get out of our ...
Our first anniversary contest ended last night, and rather than dawdle like lazy little gnomes, we decided to get the lead out and announce the winner the next day -- today, in fact.
The only catch is that because of the way Gnome Stew is set up, we need a certain amount of pointless, filibuster-style text at the start of this article, or you'll be able to read the ...
Not to take away from today's excellent Too Defined A Setting Can Prevent Player Creativity article, nor to detract from Gnome Stew's awesome First Anniversary Contest where you can win a set of Battlegraph Dry Erase Tiles, but one of my other projects is a little web site called You Meet In A Tavern and we are having a contest over there with prizes. Why not share the wealth and give ...
To celebrate Gnome Stew's one-year anniversary (of the marriage between delicious dead gnome flesh and game mastering, of course!), we're giving away a set of Battlegraph Dry Erase Tiles courtesy of Longtooth Studios.
Battlegraphs
Battlegraphs are the first commercially available successor to Tact-Tiles, which were one of the best gaming products ever made.
And they look like an excellent successor. They're modular -- they lock together like jigsaw puzzle pieces -- ...
