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
2011 proved to be an interesting year for me at GenCon. Normally, I have large blocks of time to hit the dealer hall or meet people. This year, my schedule was crammed, not the least because I only chose to attend 3 days without cutting back on my usual number of events.
As a Gnomie, this was a special con. We won our second silver ENnie (I have it ...
Once again some of the Gnomes will be rolling into Indy next week, and today's article is about where we will be and how you can find us. Despite the bad press 4e has been giving us Gnomes, we are a social bunch, and nothing gives us more of a thrill than getting to meet the people who read Gnome Stew, and write the comments that spark the ...
This coming Sunday (May 1st) after you have gotten over your Royal Wedding hangover, is Gen Con Event Registration. For those attending, this is the time for the mad scramble to get into events before your fellow dice monkeys grab all the free seats. For some there will be the sweet taste of victory and for others just a fist full of Generic tickets and a mass of ...
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! ...
Before GenCon, one of the requests that I got, was to review the new Vincent Baker game Apocalypse World. We at the Stew love to please our readers, so I took some time at GenCon, and got a chance to play a small demo of Apocalypse World (AW) with it’s creator, Vincent Baker, as well as picking up a copy of the book.
My intention was to do ...
Today is the unofficial last day to post a Gen Con review, and I did not want 2010 to go by without saying a few things about my experiences at Gen Con. As always, it was an exciting time filled with new games, new ideas, and great friends. I will do my best to give you a high level overview of all the things that went on this ...
Last night at the ENnies, Gnome Stew won silver for Best Blog! Thank you to everyone who voted for us -- you rock, and we were bowled over by our win.
Wolfgang Bauer's Kobold Quarterly took the gold, and I'm proud to have lost to Wolfgang.
Congratulations to our fellow nominees, Critical Hits, Newbie DM, and One Geek to Another, as well as honorably mentioned Sarah Darkmagic -- we were ...
There are going to be a fair amount of Gnomes/ex-patriot Gnomes at Gencon this year. We’ve got a lot of things going on: Eureka being distributed through Studio 2 Publishing (Booth #320), The Cooking Up Adventure Plots with Gnome Stew seminar, The Ennies Dinner, running various games, and ritual Halfling murder. So finding us to say hi (we don’t bite above the kneecap) won’t be too hard. There ...
This time last year, I made a deal with those of you who were unable to attend Gen Con. You picked something for me to pick up on the Exhibitor’s floor, and I reviewed it for you. That resulted in my two part review of Hackmaster Basic (Part1, Part2), and John’s review of Realms of Cthulhu.
Well it’s that time a year again, ...
This year’s Gencon was my second year attending. My first year, the decision to go was last minute and a few factors kept me from having a very good time. This year, I decided that i was going to make sure and enjoy myself. One of the ways I did that was by participating in Gencon’s VIG (Very Important Gamer) program. A few of the Gnomes had done ...
Last year I wrote a series of articles on my experiences from Gen Con 2007 and 2008, focusing on my prepping to be a GM. This year was a bit different, as I wasn't sure that I'd be able to go so I made no GMing plans.
That left me with a lot of time to play, so play I did! While I had a lot of fun, there ...
GenCon is just under 2 weeks away, and I am in full swing making my final shopping list, when I noticed that I had forgotten about all of you guys who are not going to be able to attend. So for all of you that cannot attend, I wanted to do something for you.
One of the great parts to GenCon is the convention floor. It is row ...
This will be my 10th GenCon (I started in '97, and missed '98, '01, and '08), and every year for the past several years registration has been a whirlwind of testicle-smashing pain.
Not this year.
It started off looking pretty shitty -- the site's interface for event searches, and especially for sorting, sucks. Without gencon.highprogrammer.com, my group would have had a much poorer reg experience. And I whined about event ...
We all love GenCon, but few of us can say that they love Event Registration. As a rite of passage, surviving Event Registration is one of the first steps on the path of GenCon nirvana.
In years past, the Event Registration process has been agonizing with sever timeouts and customers trapped in the payment system. This year, GenCon LLC has rolled out RUBI, their new Registration system. There have ...
For the past five years, I have attended GenCon with an average of 10 of my friends. On the larger years, it has been as large as 14 people and on the smaller years around 8. Coordinating a group that large, at the largest gaming convention of the year, is no easy task. Over the years, I have figured out some tricks for organizing such a large group ...
