Gnome Stewart Will Strangle You in Your Sleep with GMing Links

Meet Gnome Stewart:

Look at those dead, soulless eyes, their thousand-yard stare aimed firmly at a point just above your right ear. The sickly, greyish skin (which I completely failed to capture here, but trust me: he’s grey-green). And the flowers, mother of god, the flowers.

Does he carry them to remind him of the days before he started sniffing glue, when he still had a sense of smell? To ward off the bubonic plague he’s so clearly carrying? Or just to lure you close enough to tear your throat out with his sharp, yellow teeth?

I don’t want to know, but he’s our new mascot. Gnome Stewart is badass.

(He came from a little box in Barnes & Noble’s impulse buy aisle, the “Wee Little Garden Gnome Kit,” along with a miniature book. How could I not buy him?)

Ahem. On with the links!

Gnome Rodeos are our regular link roundups. Provided everyone doesn’t simultaneously stop talking about GMing for a week, you should see one most Fridays.

GMing Regulars

→ Dungeon Mastering ^[1]: Congrats to Yax on his 2008 ENnie nomination for Best Fan Product ^[2]! Well deserved, and I’ll be rooting — and voting — for you!

→ Musings of the Chatty DM ^[3]: Teaching Role Playing Games to New Players ^[4] is about that very thing, and it’s solid. Player Motivation and Types Revisited, Again ^[5] revises the now-classic list of player archetypes from Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering, and Chatty posits that WotC should accept that their digital ventures kind of suck ^[6], and stop venturing/venture harder. I’m annoyed that D&DI isn’t up and running yet, but it’s not impacting my play…yet.

→ Roleplaying Tips ^[7]: Two issues since my last roundup: One Sentence NPCs, Part 2 + Contest ^[8] in #407 fleshes out issue #406’s flagship article on one-sentence NPCs ^[9], while issue #408 looks at campaigns set 110 years or less in the future ^[10].

GMing All Over the Place

→ Amagi Games ^[11]: Hoard ^[12] is a free RPG in which you play dragons, while Long Knives ^[13] is a Gambit (plug-in addition to just about any RPG) to help you create a track intrigue-heavy campaigns. And, as predicted ^[14], Amagi Games is going places: books are in the works ^[15].

→ Asmor.com ^[16]: Treasure Trove ^[17] is a tool that outputs D&D 4e magic items according to pretty much any criteria you like: level range, slot, source, etc. (Via Encounter-a-Day ^[18], another of Asmor’s excellent ventures.)

→ Atomic Array ^[19]: The first episode of this spanking new podcast spotlights Colonial Gothic, an indie RPG about a darker, magic-y colonial America. Rone and Ed ^[20] have the chops to make this a good source of info on a new game every episode, which looks to be the plan.

→ Critical Hits ^[21]: Do the D&D core books need fluff? ^[22] (Like Stross’s Law? Try Applying Stross’s Law ^[23], one of my old TT posts.)

→ of Dice and Dragons ^[24]: In Pen, Paper, Index Cards and a Cell Phone? ^[25], Scot suggests a cool way to use Jott ^[26] — a service that lets you dictate short messages and emails them to you — to keep track of your gaming ideas.

→ Jeff’s Gameblog ^[27]: Jeff reviews issue #1 of Adventure Games Journal ^[28]. If you’re old enough to remember Judges Guild before its reincarnation (I’m too young, but not by much), this magazine might be right up your alley. Jeff’s take, as always, is worth a read.

→ Jonathan Drain’s D20 Source ^[29]: I somehow missed this one last week: 7 Habits of a Successful Dungeon Master ^[30] bends a U.K. checklist for entrepreneurs to GMing, and it fits quite well. I disagree with #2, though I see where Jonny is coming from.

→ Mike Mearls’s LJ ^[31]: No surprise that Mike can design a truly kickass encounter, and Solo Monsters and the Risk of Boredom ^[32] is full of good advice (by way of an example: a D&D 4e white dragon) on doing just that. And over on Deeper in the Game ^[33], Gnome Rodeo regular Bankuei expands on Mike’s ideas ^[34].

Also, our gnomies over at Kobold Quarterly ^[35] have been nominated for two ENnies, for Empire of Ghouls and Six Arabian Nights. Congrats, tiny lizards!

Want to see all the nominees? Of course you do! ^[2]

That’s it for this week’s Rodeo. Remember to stop and smell Gnome Stewart’s flowers…before he flenses you and wears you like a gamer skin-suit.