You already imagine colorful characters inhabiting stunning settings, you bring them to life with your words. You already plot ambitious adventures and direct the pacing of play to precise peaks. You do this because you love to run games and create content, and you’re so much better at it than you...
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So you want to try your hand at creating an East Asian Fantasy campaign setting? Start with some valuable research from Daniel Kwan’s favourites!
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I picked up a copy of Weird Las Vegas and Nevada for my upcoming Mage: The Awakening Sin City chronicle, and it turned out to be a great buy. It’s full of supernatural, bizarre and otherwise offbeat stuff about Vegas and Nevada, which is perfect for a World of Darkness game. They publish a...
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Link roundups like this one make me feel like I’m behind… • Deeper in the Game: Chris Chinn has been back since July, and I didn’t find out until this week! Chris wrote the now-defunct RPG theory blog Deep in the Game, as well as the TT post Social Contracts for RPG Groups....
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Good stuff for GMs from around the web: • You Could Learn A Lot From Lou Scheimer (Part I): Over on I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow, Dr. Rotwang has a great post about running pulp sessions where the action literally never lets up. His jumping-off point is the 1979 pilot of the animated...
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I just started reading The Making of Star Wars (which, if you geek out for behind the scenes stuff, is fabulous), and was struck by how wrong most of the original concept art for the main cast actually was. Take this guy on the right, for example. That’s Chewbacca. Specifically, it’s a...
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R.D. “Túrin” Heesen interviewed me for the latest issue of the Campaign Builders’ Guild magazine, which you can download for free in PDF form: Campaign Builders’ Guide Volume Five. We talked about giant space hamsters, my favorite GMing session, a basic principle of...
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Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea?, an article in the online edition of The Independent, kicks off with this question: “We’ve been trying to make contact with aliens for years. Now the day is fast approaching when we might finally succeed. But will our...
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Jeff Rients is trying something interesting with his current campaign: he’s letting his players ask questions about the setting via email, and incorporating the answers (which he provides) into the game. As Jeff says, “So far I really like this approach, as it forces me to think in...
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Novelist M. John Harrison has nothing good to say about worldbuilding in sci-fi stories: “Worldbuilding is dull.” “Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.” (Via Boing Boing.) I’ve read sci-fi (and fantasy)...
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Calling all Writers! Come write for Gnome Stew!
We are always looking for new articles and gnomes to throw in the stew. Drop an article proposal over at
https://gnomestew.com/write-for-gnome-stew/
Guest authors get paid the same per article rate as full time staff gnomes.
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