10 Years

Wow.

I’ve been roaming these halls and avoiding the stew pot for 10 years now.

Just wow.

Rough Start

I’ve been writing for Gnome Stew for ten years now. My first article dropped on March 28, 2016. It was an attempt to describe the differences between gaming, narrating, and simulation. This is a huge topic, and I probably wrote 3,000 words in my first draft on this topic because it needed 3,000 words to delve into. However, I took the Gnome Stew guidelines to heart (being a new Gnome and all that). The guidelines for our articles are to keep them “bite-sized” and between 700 and 1,000 words each. I managed to carve my 3,000 words down into a 973 word article. It didn’t do it justice. I should have done an intro and a series of articles about each aspect of gaming I was trying to tackle. In short, I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and I produced a subpar article that deserved (most of) the hate it received in the comments and in social media. Some of the more egregious and hateful comments have been deleted since then. I almost quit Gnome Stew immediately based on the hateful feedback I’d received from some folks that are no longer allowed to comment on articles. Fortunately, John Arcadian (Head Gnome at the time) came to my rescue and gave me a much needed pep talk. He said my article was fine, but was probably too much content for a single article. He was right. I’ve learned my lesson on how to break out articles into longer series.

Series

I’ve done a handful of series articles since those days. I’m not going to link to the articles because that would be annoying, but if you search for the keywords I’m about to drop, you can find the articles.

The series that I’ve dropped on Gnome Stew include:

• PC Backgrounds
• Interesting World Building (foods, weather, foliage, urban locations, fauna, rural locations, magic appearances)
• Adventure Design (which was a 13-part, 15,000 word effort)

Lots of Words!

During my time at Gnome Stew, I have (not counting this article) written almost 130,000 words of advice for a wide variety of players and GMs across a wide variety of topics. You can see my 100,000 word retrospective that I wrote back in 2023 that covers my highlights since I started in 2016. I also have a 40 year retrospective about my 40 (now more) years in gaming and how I’ve seen the TTRPG arena evolve in that time.

Indie Explosion

Since those two retrospectives, I’ve seen shifts in interest from the larger publisher to more indie publishers in terms of popularity. Sure, Wizards of the Coast with D&D is still the 800-pound gorilla in the TTRPG room. However, the explosion of new games (too many to list) since WotC/Hasbro caused the OGL debacle three years ago has done nothing but improve the options for all types of players and GMs out there in the world. For me, I’m extremely happy to see all of the different ideas, concepts, rules, and tools that have come about since then. It truly is an exciting time for gamers.

Those Other Games

Scrolling back in my own history back to the early 1980s, there was one RPG: D&D. Period. End of Story. Yes, I’m now aware that back then there were other games available during that time, but finding them on the shelves of B. Dalton Books or Walden Books was nigh impossible. For those of you that are much younger than me, this was also before the days of the Internet and World Wide Web. There was no “search engine” to find alternative games. It was either on the shelf at the bookstore or it didn’t exist. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I was lucky enough to have a friendly, local game store in my hometown. Even then, there were the three shelves of D&D and the one shelf of “those other games.”

I was fortunate enough that one of “those other games” included a good variety of games like Top Secret/SI, Gamma World, Tunnels & Trolls, Traveller, and so on. I loved playing all those non-D&D games in addition to D&D itself. The fact that I could expand my world beyond “only D&D” really helped me improve my RPG chops as a player and GM. Based on my past experiences, I urge you with extreme fervor to play more games than “only D&D” in order to expand your horizons and have more fun with TTRPGs than the “typical fantasy” that D&D presents. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing D&D, but there are more spices to taste than that one flavor.

Hope You Continue Hanging Out

To wrap up, I’m still super happy to be here at Gnome Stew, and I’m grateful for John Arcadian’s pep talk to keep me here. I’m also extremely humbled (even to this day) at the initial invite John sent my way. I can’t wait to see what ideas bubble up to the top of my idea list in the future.

I hope you’re here along with those ideas to see what they bring.