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 ...
With the conclusion of my most recent Corporation campaign, I have been working on the prep for my new All For One campaign. As with any new campaign I run, I like to try to shake things up, doing things differently from campaign to campaign. In my previous Corporation campaign there were very few reoccurring NPCs (largely because the players did not leave a lot of witnesses), and ...
In the past few months I have been exploring a new way to create my session notes which I called Prep-Lite. Now several months and sessions into this exercise, I have come to realize a few things about session prep, and am starting to see a general philosophy forming based on some common themes and techniques that I have used and discussed. Today I am going to try ...
In Phil’s recent article: Prep-Lite: Maps, he proposes a system of making maps for your RPG that reduces prep time but still produces simple and elegant maps. In overview, Phil proposes breaking your map into important and unimportant rooms, making a rough map of the ways your important rooms connect, and using this as a framework for lite improvisation. However, Phil makes this provision in his article: ...
In my continuing Kwai Chang Caine-like quest to find Prep-Lite mastery, I stumbled upon another place in my session prep, that was consuming a lot of my time, and begged for some prep-lite love. This time, my prep-lite scalpel made an incision into one of the cornerstone elements of our hobby...the Map. When I was done, I had once again removed precious time from my session prep without ...
Some GMs would never tolerate a computer at their game table; if a notepad worked for E. Gary, it’ll work for them. Some would be lost without a browser opened up to thirteen tabs, and multiple Excel sheets for calculating THAC0. And some, perhaps living out some brash fantasy as a librarian, swear by the lowly index card. So what’s the best way to run a ...
While prepping for my regular Sunday game yesterday, I came across an incredible link on Boing Boing. This might already be floating around out there in the general gaming geekdom, but I hadn't found it yet and felt it needed sharing! A gamer who seems to go by the online name of Burntwire took two years to build his gaming space into a great place to fit ...
Faster than a Tectonic Plate
Do your combats seem to take forever to resolve? Do you hesitate to begin an encounter in the last hour and a half of a session? When a combat is taking place, are your players’ eyes glazed over, or are they looking around for something less boring?
Good news: We can rebuild your combats. We can make them better… faster… stronger.
I find that faster combats ...
