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
Steampunk is all the rage these days, but have you ever considered the etymology of the word? The term Steampunk is clearly derived from Cyberpunk, with the major difference being one features ubiquitous steam tech, the other ubiquitous cyber tech. Aside from that, the titles say they're not supposed to be all that different. Which is to say that they share the "punk" aspect, which carries the entire flavor of ...
My wife is a neat freak. Spring cleaning never truly ends for her, but when the seasons change suddenly the house is redecorated right under my nose. Winter themed knick-knacks are replaced with spring themed knick-knacks. Artwork changes, colors change, and everything seems to change ever so slightly.
My utilitarian mind cannot comprehend why she does this. Do we really need a little banner in the garden that changes ...
The supers genre seems fairly straightforward. Discussions of themes and ages aside, most supers games and campaigns follow a fairly standardized set of plot structures. Oddly though, in the unassuming supers game lies some potent forms of player narrative control. Chief among these is the PC origin story.
In the supers origin story, the player generally gets to dictate the way in which the PC gained or discovered their ...
Mashing genres can be a fun way to put a fresh spin on a new campaign. It allows you to to draw upon tropes and plots from one genre and give them a new "desktop theme." When I started this series of articles I planned on keeping to the hypothetical, but as it turns out I began a new campaign last weekend that is a genre mash-up.
At the risk ...
More and more recently I've heard the term "genre mash-up" used to describe RPGs that heavily draw on two sources of inspiration that, on first glance, don't seem to go together. While the term is new, the idea is not. The novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is a 19th century example of mashing science with horror, while the Shadowrun RPG mashed traditional fantasy tropes with cyberpunk. And who ...
For those of us playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in the early 1980s, the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module was a big surprise. Our intrepid adventurers disovered a crashed starship and, after defeating strange monsters and robots, came out with interesting loot. During the next few adventures, it was not uncommon for a paladin to be toting a laser pistol or a fighter wearing power armor.
That ...
