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
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The smart villain is a common GMing problem. How do you portray a person who’s smarter than you? And because we’re talking about games of imagination we’re not even talking about people like Steven Hawking or Marilyn Vos Savant: we’re talking about entities beyond the limit of human intelligences; dragons, alien intellects, super villains, mad AIs, godlings, and the like, and regardless if what Benson’s says about your ...
Looking for an article idea to finish this week off with, I went trolling through the suggestion pot. The most recent question caught my eye. Crushnaut asks: "I would like to work a rival, or reoccurring adversary into the next campaign I run. How do you guys work these into your stories? Do you use the powerful, yet utterly hopeless defiler as seen ...
A new year calls for a new campaign. And a new campaign means devising a new villain.
It’s the perfect time for a GM to shine. Is there a better test than coming up with an NPC who stands in complete opposition to what your players stand for?
For inspiration I checked out my collection of Dragon back issues. The last issue published under Paizo, No. 359 from September 2007, ...
In the D&D Supplement Heroes of Horror (2005, Wizards of the Coast), authors James Wyatt, Ari Marmell and C.A. Suleiman recommend constructing a horror-themed adventure with four components.
They are: mood, setting, plot and villain.
So, it seemed natural to try and pair that approach with some of the other D&D supplements I had at hand and see what horror-inspired adventure hooks we could devise.
Oriental Adventures
“A ...
There are lots of ways to use NPCs to motivate your players to take a particular course of action (by motivating their PCs, of course), but I've recently discovered one that surprised me: lying.
Specifically, having an NPC that they would like to trust -- or perhaps have trusted in the past -- turn out to be a filthy, lowdown liar.
This is along the same lines as stealing the ...
