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 ...
I’m likely going to make the world meta-explode with this one, but let’s take that risk and talk about games. Not just the tabletop games we play, or the video games we play when we aren’t running a game or playing in one. No, let’s talk about games within the games we play. Amalgamation When we sit down to play a ...
Driftwood: Hard and Soft Scenes is the first in a line of articles that highlights an aspect of a particular RPG and looks at how it can be applied to other RPGs (see Drift in Gnomenclature). It's also probably the title of a porn movie.
Adventures in 7th Sea use a scheme of "hard scenes" and "soft scenes." Hard scenes are encounters that need to occur through the course of an adventure. ...
Last night, my group kicked off a Ghouls chronicle set in 1983 (Ghouls being a subset of White Wolf's Vampire RPG -- mortal thralls with minor supernatural powers, each bound by blood to a specific vampire), and our GM put a spin on the traditional prelude mechanic: He ran the session round-robin style.
Preludes: Nuts and Bolts
In WW games, preludes are solo (one player, one GM) mini-sessions that take ...
This is the fourth and final article in this series -- the home stretch. My definition of "roleplaying-intensive" is in Part 1, along with tips 1-3; tips 4-6 are in Part 2 and tips 7-9 are in Part 3.)
10. Driftable Mechanics
(This topic was suggested by Gnome Stew reader Irda Ranger -- excellent suggestion, IR.)
"Drift" just means taking an element -- usually a mechanic -- from one RPG and ...
