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
1,186 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
Luke Crane, the creator of the Burning Wheel RPG and one of the best GMs I've ever gamed with, often does something very clever for convention games: He runs replayable scenarios.
"Replayable" as in, even if you've played the exact same event before, it will be dramatically different -- but just as fun -- every time.
That sounds like a pretty handy thing for a GM to have on hand, ...
My planning cycles for my current game are, for me, pretty short -- usually one week. That's actually a good thing, because it forces me to focus on the important stuff and helps me avoid getting bogged down in crap that won't hit the table, but it does mean that I'll take all the help I can get.
One thing I find helpful is having a list of adventure ...
Mashing genres can be a fun way to put a fresh spin on a new campaign. It allows you to to draw upon tropes and plots from one genre and give them a new "desktop theme." When I started this series of articles I planned on keeping to the hypothetical, but as it turns out I began a new campaign last weekend that is a genre mash-up.
At the risk ...
Back in January, I wrote about using PC backgrounds as a campaign roadmap, and I've been putting a version of that concept into practice in my current Star Trek game. It's been fun and it's saved me time, so I thought it might be useful to you.
Specifically, I used a version of the Three Things approach created by the Stew's own Don Mappin: I asked my players for ...
Along with DNAphil, I've recently switched to using a template for my session prep. Phil uses a template he created; I'm using the one from the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator's Guide.
The Trek RPG template is really two templates: an outline for the episode (adventure) as a whole, which follows the three-act model common to Star Trek and many, many other TV shows (and movies, and books, and ...
Over in Le Pote du Suggestiones, Gnome Stew reader gustavovp asked us a great question. As I was typing up a response that began "I don't think there's an article in this, because..." I realized that there was -- and that many of our readers may not know about the Suggestion Pot at all.
The Suggestion What, Now?
Given that close to 4,000 of you read the Stew via RSS ...
Over in the bubbling cauldron of scum and villainy that is our Suggestion Pot, Gnome Stew reader Razjah asked this fun question (thanks, Razjah!) on the heels of John's awe-inspiring improv GMing toolkit article:
I think it would be great to see an article about transporting rpg supplies. Something that compared the tradition methods of moving books, pens, paper, minis, props, etc. with other methods.
I would love to see ...
I just got finished with my stint at Con on the Cob. I and the other gnomes, who schlepped it out to Ohio for the convention, had a blast. By and far one of the best moments of the convention for me was the total improv game I ran on Sunday. The title of it was “WHOSE GAME IS IT ANYWAYS” and the description read like this: ...
My group is three sessions into a Star Trek series with me in the GM's chair, and last night's episode cemented one of the things I like most about running this game: the episodic structure.
I've played episodic games before (notably Stargate) and enjoyed them, but until now I'd never run one. There are different ways to approach them (and the Decipher Star Trek RPG Narrator's Guide offers excellent ...
First Time GM is a series of articles dedicated to the newly-minted game master, making his or her first tentative die rolls behind the screen. Today’s article deals with techniques used to prepare for a game. A broader look at the process is here. GMing is an art form; no two GMs will prepare in exactly the same manner. In addition, the list of techniques for game ...
As I continue to use and love Obsidian Portal for game prep (Going Digital: Using Obsidian Portal to Prep for, Run, and Document a Campaign), it occurs to me that a basic wiki principle can be applied to non-wiki-based prep, too: Add it now, build it later.
The prep I've been focused on recently has been creating NPCs. I asked each of my players to include three NPCs they'd ...
I'm no Luddite, but I've always been more of an analog campaign management kind of guy. I type up adventures and notes on my desktop, but print them out to use at the table; I've used Google Maps to create a custom "living" map for a modern game, but that game also ended with a two-inch thick binder of material on my shelf.
Having been out of the GM's ...
In le Pot de Suggestiones, Gnome Stew reader scoopsy asked this excellent question:
I’m fairly good at coming up with adventures and adventure hooks (and Eureka! is there for those times when I’m not), but I frequently find it difficult to tie them into a larger, compelling campaign. If we spend more than 2-3 sessions on a villain or plotline, it seems I start losing people and then it’s ...
First Time GM is a series of articles dedicated to the newly-minted game master, making his or her first tentative die rolls behind the screen. Today’s article deals with preparing for the gaming session, commonly called game prep or just prep. For some GMs, game prep takes far more time and effort than the actual gaming sessions. We could spend weeks on game prep, but this ...
I'm fascinated by the similarities and differences between movies and adventures, as well as the ways movies can be used to inspire games, and a striking difference between them hit me recently: Pivotal moments in movies are often difficult to translate into adventures.
I'm a spoiler nazi, so I won't reveal the movie I was watching when this popped into my head, but here's the pivotal incident: A firefight ...
