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
When I'm not sitting behind a screen or writing Gnome Stew articles, I'm also an RPG freelance writer. That means that my weekly group usually gets dragged into whatever I need to playtest for my projects, the latest of which is Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space.
Running a playtest is like running a one-shot. The players are only going to be playing a short while and it's often ...
"As you leave the train station, you notice something is missing: the street is surprisingly quiet. A moment later there's a screech of wheels and the sound of a tommy gun..."
When I met Bryan and Paul for the first time at the local game store's meetup, everything clicked. In a lot of ways, it was pure luck. Bryan had heard about Spirit of the Century and was ...
In my first post in this series I spoke a little about my experiences at GenCon 2007, concentrating on rookie considerations. Obviously, I'd learned much more than that and my experiences in actually playing con games also remained with me.
Last December, I'd decided that my weekly game, which took place on Fridays ostensibly from 8-11 (although we were usually lucky to get in 2 hours of play), had ...
Recently my gaming group has gone through a bit of a gaming drought. We have had a number of cancellations occur over the past few weeks, where a single person could not make it to the session. Sometimes that person was the GM, and other times it was one of the players. With the type of games we run, and our general GMing style, our ...
When I was approached to don the pointed chef's hat and add to the stew, one of the first posts I drafted reflected on running a monthly game. I've been running a monthly game for almost half a year now, and it occurred to me that there were many parallels with convention gaming, parallels I couldn't make if I hadn't gone to my first gaming convention (GenCon 2007) ...
