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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 13, 2011 by 4

Strike While The Iron Is Hot

I was just reminded of an interesting concept the other day. My room-mate and I were hanging out in our shared office and talking about the game I am going to be starting up soon. He mentioned, offhandedly, that I’ve been doing a lot of prep for a game that hasn’t started yet. And then he said these bell-ringing words “Oh well, strike while the iron is hot, ...
Oct 21, 2011 by 9

Three Questions To Start A Campaign

I just recently kicked off a new campaign, running Triple Ace Games’ All For One. I had the fortune of having two months to plan this campaign before I ran my first session, while I was closing out my most recent Corporation game. While I was getting ready for this campaign, I had some discussions with my players about our views of how the campaign would run, the types of ...
Apr 29, 2009 by 14

The Evil Campaign

Time to dip into the Suggestion Pot to see what's cooking.... BladeMaster0182 writes "I was wondering if you guys had any advice on running an evil campaign. They’re a different monster than good ones (since evil characters are likely to kill each other.) What is a good way to keep it going? Some ideas I had were have them be apart of the same race or order." Good suggestion, and ...
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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It's why you always kill the grand vizier.