I attended a funeral this last week, which sparked thoughts about funerals in gaming. One of the most ambitious roleplaying funerals I encountered was the Throne War scenario in the Amber Diceless RPG book. Less an adventure than a vigorous kick start, Throne War used a dying family member as an excuse to gather the family together and turn the PCs loose on each other in a ...

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Phil "The Chatty DM" writes one of the best blogs for GMs out there, Musings of the Chatty DM, and he's recently kicked off something I wanted to share with Gnome Stew Readers: Project Kobold Love So what is it?Here's the quick summary in Phil's own words: I’m sick and tired of the Editions Wars. So much so that I want to show that a game system is just an excuse ...

Those of us that have grown up with the various incarnations of Dungeons & Dragons have dealt with alignment, a statistic that measures a character's ethics and morality. While the number of alignments have changed over the years, it has never been removed. Every edition has had alignment. This has spread to other games as well, such as the Palladium Megaverse and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Alignment has even ...

We're pleased to announce the three randomly selected winners of Gnome Stew's first contest, who will each be receiving three killer custom sound effects packages from World oF Twilights Studio: 1st Prize Dave the Game! 2nd Prize Cole! 3rd Prize Amakaze! Congratulations to the lucky three! And I do mean lucky -- I rolled d100 three times, and got 15, 6 and 58, the numbers of your respective comments on the contest post. Contest winners, ...

We're trying something a little different with this post -- the first in what might become a (highly irregular) series, Tomes of the Gnomes. It's kinda, sorta, maybe in a roundabout way related to GMing, and we thought you might enjoy it. Have you ever met a GM who isn't also a reader -- and probably a pretty voracious one, at that? I don't think I have. And I ...

Aegon is playing D&D 4E and he stirred the Suggestion Pot with this question: “There is something about investigation, I am having difficulty putting my finger on it., part of it is that investigation seems to break up the group, one person wants to run up, pull the funny bookm off the shelf while another wants the rogue to take a look at it for traps. This ends ...

Gnomenclature is an evolving document. As time goes on, old definitions go out of style (remember the "Caller?"), new definitions emerge (take a Tardis back to the 1980s and ask someone what a "pdf" is), and some definitions change over time. As the GNOMEnclature STEWard (okay, that made me giggle and groan at the same time :)), I'll be periodically updating the glossary. If you're a glossary junkie like ...

Okay, that's not entirely true -- what good would a short glossary for a subject as broad as roleplaying be, anyway? This puppy is anything but short -- in fact, we believe it's the largest RPG glossary on the web. It's insanely comprehensive. Just click a letter and scroll down until you find the term you want to look up, or use your browser's "Find" function. Entries are cross-linked, so ...

What’s the Crock Pot? Just a simmering bowl of lentils and herbs, with a dash of DMing observations. Don’t be afraid to dip in your ladle and stir, or throw in something from your own spice rack. I posted earlier about purchasing some of Hirst Arts’ CastleMolds with the intent of making a modular dungeon for my gaming sessions. Well, several jugs of plaster mixture and a lot of green ...

For the past five years, I have attended GenCon with an average of 10 of my friends.  On the larger years, it has been as large as 14 people and on the smaller years around 8.  Coordinating a group that large, at the largest gaming convention of the year, is no easy task.  Over the years, I have figured out some tricks for organizing such a large group ...

We got an email from Gnome Stew reader Cody Jones of gameonpodcast.com with this stumper of a question -- one we hadn't heard before. Several of us responded, so we decided to start a new series called "The Rambling Gnomes" for Q&A posts where a bunch of us gnomes nibbled on the same question. Here's Cody's email: I have a question for you fine gnomes. I currently am blessed to play ...

For those of us playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons back in the early 1980s, the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module was a big surprise. Our intrepid adventurers disovered a crashed starship and, after defeating strange monsters and robots, came out with interesting loot. During the next few adventures, it was not uncommon for a paladin to be toting a laser pistol or a fighter wearing power armor. That ...

Storm Front is the first book in The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher which centers on the adventures of a wizard and private investigator named Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Set in modern day Chicago this book is both a fantasy adventure and a classic hard-nosed detective story. The story is simple enough. Harry can barely make ends meet with his business (he is the only wizard in the ...

Most of the local terrain around my house is flat. This part of north central Illinois is prairie — flatlands in every direction.  It’s no surprise, then, that the dungeons we design around here are flat too.  The grid paper we design dungeons on is flat. The coffee tables we gather around are flat. The footmaps and map tiles we buy are flat. The minis we use certainly stand ...