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
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"If you aren’t reading Gnome Stew, you’re missing out." -- Wolfgang Baur
There were many fine entries, but Gnome Stew reader ManiacClown is the winner with his brilliant mash up of holiday cheer and cold war espionage in this gem of a comment:
Kris “Santa” Sinterklaas is many things. Among them is an international criminal mastermind, kept alive on a life-extending alchemical mixture. For centuries he has schemed to bring the world under his jolly boots of doom, earning the trust ...
Would your group play in a session that had Santa Claus in it? Sure, you can write off the legend of Santa Claus as nothing more than a myth used for entertaining children with, but let’s look at some of the finer details:
He has an arctic base of operations.
He passes judgment on others and decides whether or not to reward or punish them for their deeds.
He has an ...
Of the many ways to give the big villains in your campaign depth and make them fun for the PCs to go up against, one of my favorites is having a developed set of motivations and other cues for the villain. If you know what the villain wants, what they're like, and how they approach the world, you can switch into "PC mode" when you're planning or when ...
This is the final installment of our smart villain series, in which we discuss the smart villain’s gear. Prior parts discuss Overview, Community, and Lair External and Internal defenses.
The final line of defense a smart villain has is his personal possessions. If his contacts, his lair, his tricky tactics, and his guardians fail, all he has left are his stylish pants and whatever he has in them.
Your smart ...
In the first three parts of The Smart Villain, we talked about general approaches to smart villains, the community, and external lair defenses. This time we’re looking at interior lair defenses and tactics. In our final installment we’ll discuss the smart villain’s gear.
So as the smart villain, your base has been breached. Good thing you knew this would happen and you’ve planned accordingly with:
Traps: Much like outside the ...
In part 1 of The Smart Villain, we gave two general approaches to how smart villains are handled in game. In parts3 and 4 we’ll discuss the smart villain’s lair, and in our final part, we’ll take a look at the smart villain’s gear. This time we’re discussing, in depth, some community based strategies for your smart villain to employ. To the smart villain, community is of great ...
My latest game is a short miniseries campaign with a mix of new and old players. I planned it short to prevent GM burnout and to be able to interview new potential players. At the beginning of the game I asked for elements the players wanted to see in the game. Recurring enemies was a big one, but I had only planned this game out for 5 ...
The Desire is a full color 57 page PDF for Fourth Edition D&D by Nevermet Press (www.nevermetpress.com). (Also included was a grayscale PDF, oriented in Portrait, intended for easy printing. That's a nice feature, though one I didn't take advantage of.) Please note that the PDFs were freely provided by the publisher for review purposes.
Structure The PDF begins with a blurb about Nevermet Press followed by A Message ...
