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
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"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
Last week, some friends were discussing adventure design for publication, but the conversation drifted towards a topic I hadn't really thought about in a long time. Traps.
Way Back When Way back in ancient days, in basic and early AD&D, traps were horrific. You fail your disable trap skill and you're only one save versus poison from a grim death. Bigger than that, though, were the super traps. ...
This summer it's been my good fortune to visit a lot of parks and zoos with the family. Seeing a little wildlife, exploring a little greenery — even in carefully controlled park conditions — has invigorated my planning for wilderness encounters.
I mean, if going more extreme fits you, be my guest. One member of our gaming group took a safari to Africa last year before running the Serpent's ...
For the last year, the local organized environment featured just 4th Edition D&D. One Pathfinder Society GM ran a table, but had the same players show up consistently and wound up closing his table and running it as a campaign. A few home groups met publicly for a week or two to recruit an extra player, Call of Cthulhu recruited and filled two tables for months, but everything ...
I admit it. I’ve resisted using a mounted whiteboard for my game for a long time.
It’s not that I have anything against dry-erase markers. On the contrary, a dry-erase initiative tracker and a basic Flip-Mat brand 5-foot base map are both fine GMing tools that have a place at my table.
(And yes, I realize, they are just smaller versions of the same thing.)
My resistance to the mounted whiteboard ...
Back in December, I promised to deliver my rant on prestige classes.
Instead, I ended up designing one.
(Nothing in life goes in a straight line, it seems. Just curves, twists and unexpected opportunities.)
Using the 3.5 variant Pathfinder rules, I submitted and had published the Dawa Defender, which is available as a free download, Wayfinder 4, over at paizo.com. Thanks to some development from editors Liz Courts, Adam Daigle and ...
The group of players gathered for my Steffenhold campaign is growing in number -- pushing into the “large group” category.
Mindful of the table challenges in managing eight or more players (longer combat rounds being the most significant one), I’ve been taking a restrained approach to encounter building.
Restrained? you might ask. Yes, restrained.
Given that my Steffenhold campaign is a 3.5/Pathfinder hybrid, and thus designed for a party of four, ...
Ever get the urge to search through your bookshelf and look for something that might jazz up your home game?
I was doing that recently — specifically as a means to give spellcasters in my hombrew Steffenhold game a little extra flavor and mechanical kick.
One magic subsystem that’s worth a second look is Spell Templates. The version I have is from Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved from 2005.
As written, the ...
Even obsessive-compulsive planners such as myself — you know, full stats for every NPC, meticulously-drawn maps, crafted handouts — will have to go off the page and run a session in a more impromptu manner (especially if those rascally players refuse to snag that adventure hook you dangled so temptingly in front of them and want to set off for the dark forest instead — you know, that ...
This past GenCon, Paizo Publishing released the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Now if you've been a GM (or DM, I'll use the generic here since it's what the Open Game Content and Pathfinder uses) for more than a couple of weeks then you probably know that Pathfinder is a refinement of the previous (D&D3.5) version of Dungeons & Dragons. Today's article takes a look at Pathfinder from a prospective ...
So, your party is traveling through the woods or across that fantasy city, and you roll for a random encounter (‘cause, as a DM, that’s what we do, right?) You register the die roll result and refer to ye ol’ wandering monster chart. And instead of giving you a monster you can run right out of the Monster Manual, you see something like this:
3d6 bandits (Rangers level ...
