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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

May 1, 2009 by 27

Collaborative World Building: Dawn of Worlds

My new campaign is starting this weekend, and my group opted to make use of Dawn of Worlds to design the game world.  Dawn of Worlds is a collaborative world building system for use with RPGs, novels, or anything else for which you'd need a world.  It's system neutral which makes it useful for anyone, and it's a lot of fun in it's own right. We used Dawn of Worlds for ...
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, ...
Mar 4, 2009 by 9

The Perfect GM?

Fang asks, What Makes the Perfect Gamemaster?. It is having fascinating world, scenarios and characters? Being able improvise, but not railroad? Perhaps if one lets players act whenever / however they like? I’m a big proponent for keeps things moving; is that it? Maybe a perfect gamemaster can handle a split party with perfectly equal spotlight time? Memorizes all the rules? Is fair to the players but not ...

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Metagaming, Noooo

It's why you always kill the grand vizier.