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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

Jan 19, 2012 by 9

Quick and Dirty Overland Encounter List Template

If you’re like me you’ve found yourself thinking the following: “I need to make an encounter table for this area. It’s a swamp, so I’ll just go though all my monster books and make a list of all the monsters that can live in swamps…” and then three pages of paper and way too much time later you succumb to information overload, shelf it and go do something ...
Aug 22, 2011 by 13

Quick and Dirty Location Template

GMs must populate their settings with plenty of fun and interesting locations and after a while it can be tough to create new and fresh locations and to keep similar locations distinct from one another in your head. Over time every creepy forest tends to blur together and you don’t remember the difference between Fenwood and Bramblescar. Locations also have the capacity to be a major prep time-sink. Good ...
Sep 24, 2010 by 17

Prep-Lite Manifesto- The Template

I have recently begun a journey, on which I like to think I am not alone, to drastically reduce the time it takes me to prep my sessions. In doing so I have compiled, and in some cases created, some tools for speeding up my prep and aiding me in the running of my games,  while maintaining a complexity I like in the games I run. I have ...
Apr 13, 2009 by 10

Modular Campaign Settings: Creating a Versatile, Reusable World

Over the years, I've met lots of GMs who've created and lovingly detailed their own campaign settings, most often for D&D. These settings are usually extensively developed, complete with maps, country write-ups, elaborate histories -- the whole nine yards. But as much as enjoy writing setting material, I've never actually done this myself. I've dabbled -- drawn detailed maps for fantasy worlds, written chunks of material for specific cities, ...

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Metagaming, Noooo

It's why you always kill the grand vizier.