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.
"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
Back in October we partnered with Fear the Boot to run a charity auction benefiting the March of Dimes and raised $200. One of the things that the winner of this auction, Gnome Stew reader JavaDragon, won was the opportunity to write the first-ever guest article on the Stew -- this one.
JavaDragon did a killer job, and turned out exactly the sort of article the Stew is known ...
We’ve all been there. A mistake is created when a rule is misinterpreted or misapplied, but not caught by the group. Later on, for some reason, the mistake becomes apparent. The overwhelming temptation is to go back in time and retcon* the initial event, and fix the mistake.
Retcon – Contraction of “Retroactive Continuity”, or a rewrite of an event established in the past. Common in long-running comic books ...
What do you do when you have a chunk of time with nothing planned out? Standing in a line, between the ordering and the eating at a restaurant, waiting for a meeting to start? Don't waste that time. Instead, have the tools on hand to game. Most commonly, that means carrying around your Tiny Notebook and working on your next session, fleshing out NPCs, or roughing out an encounter or ...
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today's Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Patrick Benson's article: You Do Not Have Time for That after reading this....
When I am not wearing my pointy hat here on Gnome Stew, or behind the screen GMing, I am a Project Manager (stop boo-ing..)
In Project Management there exists something we call the Triple Constraint. All ...
This post is one of two posts today in our Gnome Stew Doubleheader. Today's Doubleheader is about designing campaigns. Check out Phil Vecchione's article Doubleheader: The Triple Constraint of A Campaign after reading this....
My father retired a few years back after several decades of being a union electrician for the Chicago Transit Authority. He was a foreman in charge of maintaining the signal services for several of the train ...
Howdy! It's been a while since I did a "Short Session" post, so I thought it was time for another!
When running a short session, your biggest enemy is time. You only have a short amount of it to get a lot accomplished. The last thing you need is to get bogged down with unnecessary time-consuming tasks. Here're a few time-savers I've developed over the years.
Use Familiar Locations
If your ...
Combat plays a significant role in most RPGs, and where there's combat there're characters getting hurt. Something I've observed is that rules for healing time are a major factor in setting the tempo of your campaign.
How so? Let's consider a few dramatically different approaches:
D&D -- Push the Healing Button!
D&D in all its forms has always made healing spells, items and potions pretty readily available. How many parties go ...
