Yesterday, we decided to launch something new: Gnome Stew is now posting bite-sized game mastering tips on Twitter.
The Hook
It’s a shared account, so all nine of us gnomes have the ability to post there. We’ll be signing off with our initials so you know who wrote what, and it’s not just an auto-feed of our articles (I don’t have much use for those myself).
I’ve been enjoying Twitter for a few months now (I’m @martinralya; our own DNAphil is @DNAphil), and when DNAphil suggested this idea we thought it sounded like a lot of fun. Twitter’s 140-character restriction makes for an enjoyable challenge — delivering concise, hopefully useful GMing tips in that format can be harder than it sounds.
Sly Flourish
I first heard about this concept — tweeting gaming tips — from Mike Shea, who tweets D&D 4e GMing tips on Twitter, and then archives them on his blog, Sly Flourish. Both his tips and his blog are excellent. If you’re not following Mike on Twitter and reading his blog, you should be.
Archived Tips
Mike’s archiving idea is simply brilliant. Posterity is one area where Twitter falls down, as it can be difficult to find old tweets — and direct linking isn’t really an option, as far as I can tell. We’ll be doing the same thing here on the Stew, so there will be periodic articles that archive all of our relevant GMing tweets here on the blog.
We think this’ll be a nifty way to deliver smaller bits of GMing goodness than our longer-form approach here on the Stew allows, and if you use Twitter it’s also a great way to connect with the gnomes.
Many thanks to the more than 70 fans who started following us yesterday. Here it is again: www.twitter.com/gnomestew. We hope you like it!
(New to Twitter, or looking for more reasons to join? Check out Berin Kinsman’s 101 RPG geeks you should follow on Twitter.)
Hey guys, if you haven’t figured it out yourselves yet, you can find the permalink for any individual tweet by clicking the time/date of the tweet. That should let you directly link to them.
P.S. Your commenter registration system is a tremendous pain in the ass, and probably discouraging a bunch of people from contributing. Why not use Akismet for spam-blocking, and modify your template to show the commenting guidelines before the comment form?