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
Just in time for Halloween, I received a PDF copy of Open Design’s Red Eye of Azathoth. One of the underlying concepts of the Cthulhu mythos is that the horrors against which the heroes struggle are inhumanly intelligent and incredibly long-lived or possibly immortal. Thus investigators rarely get to see the long term implications of the villain’s plots. Instead, there is the assumption that there’s more history to ...
Back before Gencon, Phil threw out an article asking for Gnome Stew fans to pick games for us to pick up and review. Phil reviewed Vornheim – The Complete City Kit and I am now reviewing Microscope. We got no compensation or free copies for these games. I take a long time to do my reviews, mostly because I want to get deeply into what I’m reviewing ...
Just before Gencon, Charles Ryan of Cubicle 7 shot an invite to the Gnomes to come by the booth and talk with the designers of The One Ring. We shot a couple of potential questions back and forth and I decided to haul along my video equipment to see if we could get the interview on tape. More than just get an interview though, Charles comped me a ...
A while back (quite a while back actually) I was given a complimentary PDF copy of Courts of the Shadow Fey for review purposes. The concept was interesting and I was looking for an excuse to get my group to give 4th ed. D&D a valid try. My goal was to give the mini-campaign a decent play test. Sadly, before my group could get familiar enough with 4th ...
Once again some of the Gnomes will be rolling into Indy next week, and today's article is about where we will be and how you can find us. Despite the bad press 4e has been giving us Gnomes, we are a social bunch, and nothing gives us more of a thrill than getting to meet the people who read Gnome Stew, and write the comments that spark the ...
From the moment I read the Fiasco rules (link and link) I knew that there was something special about this game. Within its short 135 pages was a game of pure brilliance, finely tuned to a specific type of play and yet structured to allow for nearly unlimited re-playability. While I have enjoyed playing Fiasco numerous times over the last year, my inner game designer has been curious ...
Before I get to the the review, I need to tell you my feelings about ham.
Trust me. There is a point to this.
I do not like ham. Never have. I like bacon, pork chops, and pork roast, but I have never liked ham. I cannot blame this on ham though, because this is a matter of my personal tastes. You can serve a world class Virginia smoked ham ...
This review has been a long time in the coming. I’ve had both of these books on my shelf for a while* and I’ve been sitting on doing the review for no real particular reason. Neither of these books were comp copies and this review is unsolicited. These are just two products that I’ve had for a while and wanted to review.
Ok, lets talk about the books, and ...
So imagine this situation, it is about 1 day until game time and your encounter with the BBEG or a very important plot piece or fight is slated to happen in the next game. Unfortunately, the characters aren't quite ready to take it on or the player who has backstory hooks isn't going to be there. Darnit, what do you do? The obvious answer is to stall ...
“Life is like a box of ammo.” – Duke Nukem At Con on the Cob (about which much more later), I ran across one of the cooler props I’ve seen in the last year (including Gen Con). These are the AmmoCounters from Das Spiel Unker (a German pun for ‘The Basement Gamer’). Some background: In addition to RPGs (and parentheses), I ...
After seeing a preview of Outbreak: Undead (warning: has sound) online, and then again at GenCon, I knew I wanted to review this game for the Stew. I love zombies, horror, survival horror, and all the intersections thereof, and Outbreak: Undead (OU) is a zombie survival horror RPG -- right up my alley.
It's also an "avatar game," an RPG in which you play a character based on yourself ...
Filling the Empty Chair is a PDF resource designed to help gamers find people to play with. Written by Johnn Four, the the editor of Roleplaying Tips, it combines player-finding advice with freely-available information. It's a 30-page PDF available for download from RoleplayingTips.com for $7.
This is a review of Version 1.03. As the back of the book indicates, this is a "living document" and may be updated as ...
On Thursday I read about a new book by called Hamlet’s Hit Points coming out through Gameplaywright Press. Their book Things We think About Games is a carry everywhere book for me. It sits in my very-manly-not-a-purse courier bag alongside a few other books, work things, and the odd death ray or two. Hamlet’s Hit Points is written by Robin D. Laws, and when I saw the announcement ...
Way back when, at Gencon 2009, I was comped a copy of Runepunk. I’ve been meaning to sit down and write a review, but I never feel right about doing a review unless I’ve gotten deep enough into the product to really understand it. I finally found enough time to really get into Runepunk and see what it is all about. So, a little under a ...
So the Gnomish festival of Lupercalia (a very long feast of drinking, dancing, and slaughtering halflings), which was turned into something having to do with hearts, flowers, and naked flying babies called Valentine's day, occurred about 2 months ago. Just prior to this, our very good Gnome Matthew Neagley started trading messages back and forth with E, from Geek's Dream Girl. The result of their tweetfest was ...
