Tavern Watch Podcast

The  Legend in the Mist  TTRPG has finally released, and  Tavern Watch  is here to dip our toes back into the world of rustic fantasy adventure! It's time for the Spring Renewal Festival in the little town of Ravenhoem, kicking off the warmer part of the year by tossing out the old and welcoming in the new, but everywhere you look it just seems like things are going awry: there...

This week on the  Tavern Watch Podcast , we discuss one of the favorite pastimes of tabletop GMs: stealing borrowing very liberally from our favorite movies, books, and even other games for our own tabletop games. Matt has put players into an episode of  Star Trek  before, and Phil borrows heavily from everything (including perennial Blizzard Watch Discord favorite  V...

After finally catching up with the lost pet they were sent to chase, our mercenary crew only has only one problem: they're under attack by goose lizards (or possibly cobra chickens). Well, maybe two problems, because also their ship is grounded. But it's probably fine. It's gonna be fine, right? This week on Tavern Watch Plays, we're doing an actual play of  Planet Mercenary ,  a comic s...

With their ship missing and a cheerful reality TV show host narrating their every move, our mercenary crew's simple mission — retrieve a lost pet — has gotten a lot more complicated. We probably should have expected that when someone hired an entire mercenary company to find one lost pet. This week on Tavern Watch Plays, we're doing an actual play of  Planet Mercenary ,  a comic space op...

Our crew of mercenaries has an unusual mission: to rescue some kind of space kitten, whose owner is very concerned for its wellbeing. But its owner's brother will pay us to  not  bring it home, so it's probably a troublesome space kitten. (But it's just as likely to be completely average kitten.) At least we're pretty sure it's a kitten. Our client didn't give us many details, but it's g...

This week on the Tavern Watch Podcast , we discuss some exciting news for fans of all things that go bump in the night: a new  Vampire: the Masquerade project was teased for GenCon 2026, including a commitment to "human-created" art, as opposed to AI slop. Elsewhere, several of the new and returning Darklords from D&D's upcoming Ravenloft book  were revealed, including an all-out sta...

In this week's Tavern Watch Podcast, we're discussing  Daggerheart , the much-hyped TTRPG from Darrington Press and Critical Role which is  celebrating its first anniversary . One year in, our biggest complaint is that the game still doesn't do anything radically new to break typical TTRPG paradigms, but it packs a lot of mechanics (and tools for GMs) in a flexible system that's relative...

In  Tavern Watch 's finale of our three-part run of  See You Space Cowboy , our tenacious bounty hunters have tracked the NFTHound and his remaining cronies to an unmarked warehouse, full of cheaply-paid goons and a bunch of impressionable youth that the villain is trying to sway to the side of his sleazy world of electronic currency and extremely expensive digital pictures of ugly apes....

Hot on the trail of some scumbag NFT and crypto traders (aka their latest bounty targets), the  Tavern Watch  team lays an ambush for their bounty in this week's episode of  See You Space Cowboy  on our TTRPG actual play podcast. What follows is one of the most chaotic fight sequences we've ever had; shots are fired, a few people get knitting needled, there's a mishap with...

It's time for a brand new game on  Tavern Watch , called  See You Space Cowboy ; this one takes place in a solar system that looks a lot like famous anime  Cowboy Bebop's but with the serial numbers... well, not even filed off, just kinda smudged a little bit. If you're willing to get your hands dirty, talk to people who always know something for a cost, and hunt down some of the mo...

On this episode of the  Tavern Watch Podcast , we're talking about the return to Strixhaven (where their undergraduates can now prepare spells like  D&D  Wizards), some of our upcoming favorite crowdfunding projects -- among them  the multiplayer expansion to  Ion Heart , Austin Walker's debut game  Realis , and the genre-straddling Cypher System megadungeon ...

It's just another average day in Ternion City: four agents of the Triangle Agency, paragons of order keeping reality safe from anomalous activity that wants to rend it asunder, find themselves confronted with the job of what to do with the remains of a Wuhan-Baxter corporate killsquad, while their final member comes face-to-face with her biggest challenge so far: an extremely well-presented busine...

Welcome back to serene Ternion City, where things are heating up in the case of the missing-then-returned-but-boneless Zbarro renovators. After their investigations last time at the hospital yielded some frankly disturbing results, the agents of the Triangle Agency have decided that the best way to get to the bottom of what's going on at the Wuhan-Baxter Building shopping promenade is to investiga...

Welcome back to beautiful Ternion City, where the agents of the Triangle Agency are looking out not just for your best interests, but all of reality. We love reality! That's where all our stuff is! And our agents definitely have a doozy of a case on their hands this time: some contractors who had been working on an outdated shopping promenade (conveniently located in the basement of one of Triangl...

On this episode of the  Tavern Watch Podcast , the team gets a win -- a win in naming things, it turns out, as Wizards of the Coast (in addition to finally announcing  some products for 2026 ) also has started referring to the 2024 revision of  D&D  as " D&D 5.5e ." Considering it ended up being more a balance update than the massive revolution in tabletop gaming that w...

The team of adventurers-turned-detectives in our playthrough of  Starfinder's  Murder in Metal City has the body of Tier-99-Professor on their hands and the assumed murderer hot in their trail for getting too close -- but does anyone think they're really going to stop before they get answers about what happened? They'll delve into the depths of the Striving university archives and uncove...

With a lead in their hot little hands freshly pried from the storage of a hijacked murder-drone, our crew of  Starfinder adventurers -- brought together first to meet their friend Tier-99-Professor, then by happenstance to investigate his murder -- dive into the back alleys and data storage centers of Striving to see if they can pin down any clues as to why someone would want the good Profess...

A group of strangers gather in a dimly lit bar in the mechanical megalopolis of Striving at the behest of one Tier-99-Professor, who promised them some incredible news. Unfortunately, Tier-99-Professor -- "Tierney" to his friends -- has already experienced an unexpected shutdown, and now it's up to his group of friends to hunt down who would want to take out Tierney and why on the mean streets of...

Keeping things tense and exciting in tabletop games without just resorting to throwing the players into a fight is a central part of our discussion today on Tavern Watch -- we're talking torches burning down in Shadowdark or Crows, using the spotlight like a TV show director to keep things tense in Monster of the Week, or the Chaos mechanic in Triangle Agency that makes every roll a balancing act....

Things are getting even weirder for our party of all Artificers as they wrap up their sojourn into the Mournlands in the name of... doing something. It's a little brain-bending. There's Kuo Toa, there's weird brain-sucking devices, there's dragon turtle friends, there's a lot going on here, honestly that I think we just managed to scratch the surface of. Also, someone turns into a kaiju, and it's...

There's an old chestnut about how if you confront an average  D&D  party with a door, they'll try anything except going through it. Luckily, our merry band of  Artificers who trekked into the Mournlands  aren't just any old adventurers: they're extremely intelligent ones. This doesn't prevent them from being rude to talking doors and getting in fights with weird, goopy crea...

Is there any  D&D 5E  class more flexible without a single multiclass level than the Artificer? Frontliner, support, pet class, magic gunsmith, weird mapmaker, Dr. Frankenstein, whatever your fantasy of "techno wizard who builds thing" is, the Artificer has a way to help you live it out. In celebration of that, this edition of Tavern Watch Plays goes to the original home of the Artif...

It's the beginning of one year and the end of the next here on  Tavern Watch , and so we're both looking back with fond remembrance on the games we played this year (including  the ones we played on Tavern Watch Plays , which you should check out!) and the ones due to come out next year. Liz was particularly pleased and surprised by  Legend in the Mist , a statless rustic fantasy RP...

It's a valid question for our group of little old lady detectives, who have learned more than they expected about the strange history of their little town on a casual visit to the Brindlewood Bay Whaling Museum... with a little side of murder. It happens a lot in Brindlewood Bay. It's probably fine. This is the last episode of our game of  Brindlewood Bay , a cozy mystery with a few dark twis...

A peaceful visit to the annual Brindlewood Bay Whaling Museum fundraiser has taken a turn for the worse when one of the volunteers turns up dead. Fortunately we have a team of little old lady detectives on the case... and they're pretty sure it wasn't an accident at all. (The harpoon stuck in his back is a pretty big clue.) This week we're playing a game of Brindlewood Bay, a cozy mystery with a f...