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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

Nov 3, 2009 by 20

Your Expectations Lose To Player Participation

As a player I recently experienced two opposite approaches to how a game master can react to the players’ input during a session. One GM made sure to incorporate what the PCs did into the game, and the other made sure to keep the plot on track with what he had prepared. I am not going to go into the details, but guess which game sucked? ...
Jan 16, 2009 by 9

Flexible Planning

The previous session of our campaign was a couple of weeks ago (before Christmas). We left on something of a cliffhanger-- the PCs ambushed and slaughtered the Evil Dwarf King's elite guard, in two back to back battles that were almost a session long apiece. After their victory, I started to skip ahead and sketch out some downtime, but the players had a quick conference and stopped me. ...

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