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
1,110 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.
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One of the big GMing theory questions that constantly goes through my head is how to make important things stand out to the players. I’ve done a few articles in the past about how to do this. Still, I keep coming back to the concept and ways to do it better. While thinking about this the other day, one key concept keeps sticking in my head: If ...
A little while ago a buddy of mine decided to run an impromptu game. It was his second attempt and he did pretty well. There were only a few newbie GM mistakes and the game went over pretty well for the limited time we had to play. The biggest thing that I saw, and that sparked a thought in my head, was that the game was overpacked with ...
Stew reader LesInk threw an interesting morsel into the suggestion pot the other day. It is about the concept of railroading and how you force an event to happen when the plot absolutely calls for it. The concept is an interesting one, and LesInk put forth a great solution along with the question and story. Dear Gnomies, I believe ...
While I was watching old movies and cleaning out my basement a few weeks ago, I watched a movie that made me go “Wow! That was totally someone’s role-playing game!”. It wasn’t the first time that happened to me, and this isn't the first time that the idea has been discussed here on the stew ( 1 | 2 ). There are a lot of movies and ...
In the D&D Supplement Heroes of Horror (2005, Wizards of the Coast), authors James Wyatt, Ari Marmell and C.A. Suleiman recommend constructing a horror-themed adventure with four components.
They are: mood, setting, plot and villain.
So, it seemed natural to try and pair that approach with some of the other D&D supplements I had at hand and see what horror-inspired adventure hooks we could devise.
Oriental Adventures
“A ...
