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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

Dec 22, 2011 by 15

Social Skills: Evil, Twisted, or Misunderstood?

Fred Hicks linked off to an article by Stephen called Why the Standard Social Skills?. It's an excellent post, drawing parallels between several popular systems, and noting some of the oddities for character social skills in RPGs. You should read his post (and the comments), but I'll emphasize a few points that spoke to me. Somewhere along the line, it became accepted fact that RPGs with social skills break ...
Jul 15, 2008 by 9

NPCs: Filthy Liars

There are lots of ways to use NPCs to motivate your players to take a particular course of action (by motivating their PCs, of course), but I've recently discovered one that surprised me: lying. Specifically, having an NPC that they would like to trust -- or perhaps have trusted in the past -- turn out to be a filthy, lowdown liar. This is along the same lines as stealing the ...

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Metagaming, Noooo

It's why you always kill the grand vizier.