Join Ang, Josh, and JT as they talk about how to teach new rules to your tables. They cover their best practices, the difference between one-shots and campaigns, and many other aspects of incorporating new rules, systems, and mechanics to your table.

LINKS:

How To Make Your Own GM Screen

Libra Valoris

Edge Cases Series

Vox Machina Season Four Trailer

Prepping Your Game In Obsidian

Last year, Josh wrote a great intro article to Obsidian using it for prep: here. You should read that article as well. 

Obsidian In a nutshell

In essence, Obsidian is a low-tech database (vault). The application is quite smart. At its core, Obsidian data is just markdown (formatted text) files in folders. The application sits on top of that structure and provides functionality and formatting. 

What is great about this setup is that the data is yours. Should you want to change applications or Obsidian vanishes one day, your data is sitting in readable text files in a set of folders, and not trapped in a proprietary database container. You can port this data anywhere you want. 

Markdown text gives you a good amount of formatting options, and if you get handy at the syntax, you can format your text without having to take your hands off the keyboard, speeding up text entry, while still having a clean and organized look. 

Finally, Obsidian has plugins that are community-created and extend the functionality of the core application. 

Obsidian as your Campaign Manager

I do not use Obsidian to prep my games. I have been a OneNote fella for years, and OneNote is still my go-to for prep. Where I find the best use for Obsidian is as my Campaign Manager. 

Campaigns require managing a lot of information, and a lot of it is kind of small. Some entries will be large and detailed, but there will be an equal number (or more) of short descriptions for things like that Bartender in that town the characters went through in session 12. You won’t always know when a campaign element will be important again. 

Before Obsidian, I kept this data scattered in session prep pages and index cards that I filled out during the game. It was haphazard and required that I remember when something happened in order to track it down. It was inefficient during prep, when I had the time to look through things, and worse during the session, when I wanted to avoid “dead air” by looking things up. 

Using a database for managing the data is much better. For starters, I can see all my entries in a tree format, or I can search my notes, and there is a cool web tool that shows me the linkage between pages. Looking up items during prep or during play is much faster now. 

My Core Obsidian Setup

For any given game, I have a core Obsidian configuration that I build from. I keep this template as its own Vault in a folder. When I start a new campaign, I deploy a copy of this vault and finish customizing it. You could just use one vault for all your games, but I like having a vault per game. Keeps things tidy.

Community Plugins

I have some default community plugins that I find useful:

• Buttons – lets me make clickable buttons in a page that link to other pages.
• Dataview – this lets you write queries on pages (i.e., all the NPCs associated with a location). 
• Homepage – this creates a landing page for me anytime I open the vault.
• Paste Image Rename – this cleans up image names when you paste things into the vault.
• Tag Wrangler – I love using hashtags on my pages. Tag Wrangler helps you organize, fix, and migrate tags.
• Templater – allows you to create templates for certain types of pages (i.e., NPCs)

Core Folders

As Josh mentioned in their article, you can create folders to help organize your Obsidian entries. I have a core set of folders: 

• Assets – holds images and other attachments
• Characters – a page for each character in the campaign
• GM Notes – a place for my own notes
• Ideas – a folder for future ideas for sessions
• Locations – contains the various locations in the campaign. 
• NPCs – this contains entries for each NPC in the game
• Setting Materials – any entries for setting information in the game I am running.
• Templates – holds page templates for things like NPCs.

For each game, I will add folders based on the needs of the game. My Obsidian vault for Blades in the Dark has folders for Scores (where I keep a summary sheet of each score) and Factions (where I have a page for each major faction in the game). 

Custom Theme

I will also find a custom theme for the vault that is easy to read and reminiscent of the game I am running. For me, the most important thing about the theme is that I have different themes for each vault, to help me tell the difference between them.

Technical Considerations

By default, Obsidian resides on a single computer. If you want to use it across more than one device, you can either put the vault into a shared drive (iCloud, Google, Dropbox) or you can use their online service (there is a cost). I keep mine in a shared drive. 

What that allows me to do is to manage my campaign at my desk using the desktop client, but access the data from my iPad while I am running my game. 

Things I do for Campaign Management

As my campaign manager, Obsidian holds information about various campaign elements. An element gets added to Obsidian during prep or after a session, depending on where it was created. If an NPC or location was created while I was prepping the session, then I will add it to Obsidian before the session. If the element was created during the session, then I will add an entry after the session. 

Some other good information practices: 

• Hyperlinks – Obsidian, in a very wiki-like way, will help you create hyperlinks to other pages. Where possible, I will use hyperlinks to connect an entry to other entries. This turns your information into a web rather than a filing cabinet. 
• Tags – Organically, I create tags for pages. Some tags are for the type of content (#npc), and others may be for a specific PC (#mist), or others for session names (#deepmoor). I can then search for things by using these tags.
• Dataview – Dataview will let you create queries for page links, including searching for tags. I used dataview to create a dynamic list for things like NPCs related to a given PC. 

Updates

For me, this is where Obsidian became my killer Campaign Management app. At the bottom of each entry (regardless of type) have a Notes header. Under this header, I add a bullet for each session where this element came into play and add some notes about what happened. This way, if I go and look at a recurring NPC, I can see a list of all the times they came up in the campaign and what happened to them. 

In my Post-Game Debrief, I will go into Obsidian and add these entries to the notes section while the game is fresh in my head. It is a bit of work, but the payoff has been noticeable. 

First, the act of adding the notes to the pages reinforces in your own mind what happened in the game. Second, it gives your campaign that dynamic feel, that things do grow and change during the game. Third, during your prep or sessions, your ability to look up a given element is aided by the fact that you can search by session number or name. Or you might have Dataviews built to show all the elements updated in a given session. 

Manage Your Way

Obsidian is so flexible that there is no one way to use it. It’s lightweight framework and active community of plugins make it highly customizable. I found it easy to get started. Just a bit of working knowledge is enough to be able to start using it. If you do get into it, you can get into much more advanced features. There is a vast amount of information on YouTube for Obsidian. There are some videos for TTRPG use, but to get down the basics, you can watch the non-TTRPG ones, as many do a great job of getting you started. From there, you can set your vault up similar to mine or go off and make your own. 

Having a vault is nice, but it will only pay off if you get into the habit of entering new data and updating existing data. Figure out in your prep and your post-game debriefs where updating Obsidian fits for you. Make it a regular task as you manage your campaigns. 

Do you use Obsidian for campaign management? How do you have yours set up? What are your must-have plugins? If you don’t use Obsidian, what do you use for managing your campaign information?

Last month, I introduced some aspects of GM/player interactions, and I’m going finish off what I have for you on this topic here and now.

Make Things Interesting

GMs should set up and introduce interesting/difficult choices to the players. They don’t always have to be life or death. They don’t always have to be “save the victim or catch the villain” type choices either. Interesting choices are things that will hit with deep, emotional resonance for the players by way of what is important to their characters. There are also difficult choices to make where the PCs can gain advantage in one aspect of the story by sacrificing something important to them or losing ground in a different aspect of the story.

On the flip side of the conversation, players need to step up to challenges and do their best to conquer them. Yes, working around them is sometimes the smart thing to do. Yes, running away from a challenge can also be the proper action, but (as Ang likes to say), you’re playing the Big Damn Heroes, so you really should act like it.

Let Them Shine

GMs need to establish scenes, settings, and scenarios to allow the different PCs in the group to display their competencies. This is part of spotlight management. If there’s nothing to shine a light on, then why is there a spotlight in the first place? This basically means to tailor some challenges to allow PCs to leverage their special skills, abilities, and powers. If you can get a single challenge to require teamwork between the disparate abilities for a better chance of success, all the better.

For players, you’re going to see some amazing things tossed in front of you from the GM. If you want to see more of what you have on your metaphorical plate, compliment the GM on what you’ve experienced. This will naturally encourage the GM to include more of that type of interaction in future sessions. We, as a people, tend to focus on what we didn’t like in an experience, but if you can seek out the positives and reinforce those, then you’ll get more of those positives.

Celebrate Accomplishments

As a GM, be happy when a scenario, die roll, skill check, or some amazing plan of the PCs goes as it should or exceeds all expectations of success. Cheer them on. Even if that “nat 20 with max damage” critical hits your Big Bad and almost kills it in a single strike, cheer on the PCs. This will make everyone happier. Also, if things doesn’t quite go the way the players had planned or if a “nat 1, drop your sword” happens at the wrong moment, sympathize with the player who just had their precious math rocks betray them.

Players also need to celebrate the GM by congratulating them on a well-run session, an interesting experience, an engaging interaction, or a wonderful campaign. This will go a long way to prevent the GM from burning out and stepping out from behind the GM screen. If you want your GM to run more (and maybe longer) games, let them know that via compliments and thanks.

Critique (NOT Criticism)

Some definitions to start this section:

A critique is a somewhat formal process in which the carefully expressed judgments, opinions, or evaluations of both the good and bad qualities of something are delivered to the creator.

Criticism is most often used broadly to refer to the act of negatively criticizing someone or something.

GM’s will almost always have opinions on PC decisions, choices, plans of action, and approaches at overcoming challenges. Hold back on those while the game is actively going on unless a player is making a decision that goes against something their character knows, but the player does not. There are times where “in world knowledge” might be apparent to a character, but not their player. This could be because the player took a bathroom break during a key moment, missed a session, simply forgot a detail from many sessions ago, or maybe wasn’t exposed to that information in the first place. Once some certain set of actions are resolved, let your players know what they did well, how they could have maybe worked better together as a team, and if something went sideways, what they could have done to manage the situation better.

From a player perspective, the feedback loop via critiques to the GM are very important. This helps the GM bring forth more of the “bright spots” of the game to the players, and assists the GM in finding the “rough edges” that need to be sanded down to a more smooth interaction (or maybe eliminated completely). If you, as a player, find anything in the game (plot, story, theme, NPC, setting, situation, location, etc.) especially interesting or inspiring, let the GM know. The other side of the coin for pointing out unenjoyable moments is completely fair game, but try to not focus only on the negatives when delivering a critique. There are always shining moments in every game session.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this two-parter of an article. This particular topic has been sitting in my “Gnome Stew to do list” for a very long time, and I’m happy that I finally got it to bubble to the top. Do you have any interactions that I may have missed between the first and second article on this topic? Let me know! I’d love to discuss it with you in the comment section.

Join Ang, along with Jared and guest Andy Jaksetic as they talk about starting new campaigns and everything we need in place before we can start to think about session zero.

LINKS:

Matinee Adventures

Origins Game Fair

DC Justice League Unlimited RPG

Join Ang along with Josh and JT as they talk about how to navigate the curveballs life throws at us and gets in the way of us playing RPGs. It’s going to happen at some point or another, so let’s figure out how to handle these speed bumps!

LINKS:

Podcasts JT Listens To

Just Dice Kickstarter

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

Astarion BG3 Prequel by T Kingfisher

The tabletop role playing experience is a collaborative one. That’s a well-established fact. To properly collaborate, everyone at the table needs to be aware of the interactions at the table. I’m not talking about what NPCs the PCs know or how the Big Bad Villain interacts with their lieutenants and such. I’m talking about the “metagame” interactions that exist between the humans sitting at the table. This is a complex web as each player has a relationship with each other player and the GM. The more people you have at the table, the more complex this gets. I would hope everyone is friendly toward one another (if not, find a new group).

To lean into those interactions both in the game level and at the table between the people sitting in the chairs, I have a set of advice here (and in next month’s article, too) to help everyone get along better and deepen the game experience. Yeah. That’s right. This is a two-parter because I have enough to say on the matter to have enough content for two articles.

Each section in these two articles will focus on how the GM can enhance the game with their interactions to the players. In addition, I’ll have advice for the players on how they can act, react, respond, and interact with the game to make things better.

Be Their Biggest Fan

As the GM, you should cheer on the players when they come up with great ideas, make awesome rolls, or perform spectacular feats with their characters. Even if your carefully curated plans are completed foiled by what the players do or come up with, you need to be proud of their accomplishments. Don’t get salty if they find a logical shortcut to what you had in your mind as a solution. Don’t tamp down on spectacular abilities or if a player finds a way to stack up bonuses to get +40 on their athletics skill check to jump between ships to get to the bad guys’ captain more quickly than you had imagined possible. Find those events amazing and congratulate the players on putting things together just right.

For the player side of things, support the GM’s storylines. This is more than just taking the bait to start an adventure. If an important NPC gets introduced, lean into a conversation or interaction with them. If the GM throws you the spotlight for an encounter or scene, then take that light and shine in it. Don’t brush off opportunities to do things or become even more awesome than you already are. The GM has spent time coming up with these things (or has spent copious time studying a published adventure) to enhance your game play. Be eager to delve into the storyline!

Reel Them In

In one of my Adventure Design articles, I talk about good story hooks and starting adventures. The article delves deep into the topic, but the gist of the article is that you need a strong start. Give the players some bait on the hook to latch onto when the adventure starts. It’s hard to catch a fish with a naked hook, so you have to make it appear juicy on the surface. There also needs to be some good content under the surface to keep the momentum going once the players latch on.

As a player, you need to take the bait. Grab the hook. Actually, don’t just grab the hook. You need to swallow it whole! If the GM has dropped an obvious setup for an adventure, don’t complain about it being irrelevant to your character. You don’t know that yet. This may just be a starter session to get things rolling, and it’ll become more obvious later to you that events really are relevant to you and your character.

Higher Powers

Game masters are not a higher power. They are not a deity of great power. Yes, the GM may have home brewed an entire world for the players to romp around in, but this does not make them the all-powerful, all-knowing god that is in control of everything. If you, as the GM, have this concept in your head, I assure you that you have less control over the events that are underway than you think.

For players, you are not to worship the person on the other side of the GM’s screen. They are imperfect and will make mistakes. If you spot a rule being misused and it’s a detriment to the game, bring it up in a nice and friendly manner. If it’s not a detriment to the game, wait until after the session (or between sessions) to bring it up. If you see a flaw in the story or a contradiction in who is recalling past events, ask some questions to get clarity on the situation. Don’t step up and directly challenge anyone (the GM or your fellow players), but some questions of clarification come across as less confrontational and can lead to better storytelling down the road.

Trust But Verify

If a player is about to make a horrible decision or take a less-than-smart action with their character, it’s perfectly fine for the GM to ask, “Are you sure you want to do that?” That opens the door for a conversation about what the character would know versus what the player perceives as reality for their character. There are many times when the character would inherently know something that the player might be oblivious about. This is because the character “grew up in the world” while the player may have only read a “three page summary” of the world. As Ang has said many a time on the Gnomecast, “Trust the competency of the characters.”

For the players, if you get a strong hint from a GM, stop and listen. Consider your planned actions and the ramifications of those actions. It might not mean the death of your character, but it could lead to a paladin being stripped of their holy powers or a druid losing spells due to violation of their neutral stance in the world, or something similar. These are great times for open and honest communication between the GM and the players to ensure everyone is on the same level with the same information. Of course, after the conversation, you can still proceed with your declared action at your own risk. At least you’ll be doing it with full information.

Conclusion

As I said at the top, this is the first part of a two-parter. Next month, I’ll be talking about four additional aspects of how to handle the interactions between GMs and players.

Join Ang along with Jared and Tomas as they talk about short campaigns. They cover the major differences between a traditional long campaign with a short one, the reasons we might want to run one, and many things to keep in mind.

Links:

Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG

Pirate Borg Starter Set

Goth Borg

Join Ang along with Chris and JT as they talk about Narrative Positioning! What even is that and what does it mean for our games? They dig in and have a conversation about it.

LINKS:

The Streets of Avalon

MinMaxed

Tentacles and Tales

Origins Game Fair 2026

Never let it be said that Gnome Stew doesn’t keep up with the times. We’ve heard all this buzz about LLMs and CCCs and ROPs and whatever and we know that the future is AI. It’s one of the few rare advancements in technology that comes with no downsides and has no drama around it.

So, to keep up with the times, and hopefully put all of our gnome authors in the stew quicker, we have been hard at work synergizing the future and maximizing sharegnome profits with our own AGI – Artificial Gnome Intelligence! Introducing HATGPT – the next evolution in gaming and gamemastering advice!

While still in the initial phases of development, we have made sure our AGI is fully environmentally friendly. Well, it’s powered by hamsters on play wheels being force fed french fries, so there are some… undesirable… outputs from the power source. We tried to bypass the hamsters and just go with potato batteries, but the spuds were a dud so we cut them up and moved onto plan C. Unfortunately the Chipmunks started a band and got popular on tik tok, so we tried and tried again, finally – plan H for hamster provided viable results.

The thinking engine of the AGI is built from innovative future forward technologies and is 100% small batch and organic. You see, when you make stew out of gnomes, there are some parts that don’t cook well. Thanks to groundbreaking recycling efforts from Dr. Gnome-en-stein, we were able to take those leftover bits of greymatter, clump them together, wire em up, and stick them in a jar. One console input later and we were able to  launch HATGPT.

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.