Tavern Watch Podcast

It's time for a new adventure with our Tavern Watch crew as we dive into Outgunned Adventure (and, yes, we're going to be using the word adventure a whole lot here). Our story opens with our daring explorers climbing to the top of a mountain in the middle of the ocean near Greenland in search of the tomb of the viking king Eric the Red, and whatever treasure he has left behind. (Valuable both monetarily and historically, of course.) Our party must brave the elements, each other (sometimes the biggest challenge), and any traps left behind by the ancient viking warriors.

Join GM Joe Perez as he guides the definitely ideal team of explorers through danger (sometimes self inflicted) and cliffhangers (sometimes literal). This week's players are:

• Eric as Savar Khan, a fighter who may have more brawns than brains (an essential piece of every adventuring party) and could have more fashion sense than the rest of us put together.
• Phil as Raymond Suri, the obligatory professor who may be a little out of his depth (and scared of heights, making him the perfect mountain climbing companion).
• Liz as Victoria Sheng, a professional bounty hunter (the current bounty is treasure) who's getting too old for this.
• Matt as Natalya Morozova, a former soldier who's chasing the latest treasure for the thrill of it (and occasionally dropping shocking character reveals).

This is the first in a three-part game of Outgunned Adventure, a variant of Outgunned by Two Little Mice. These games are all about creating cinematic moments inspired by the movies, and Adventure is all about exploring ancient tombs and charging through dense jungles in search of treasure! It's a setting with movie magic built right in, from The Mummy to Indiana Jones. If you enjoy the game, check out Two Little Mice!

The music in this podcast is "Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the latest Tavern Watch Podcast, we're excited about Draw Steel, a new game from MCDM that strikes us as spiritual successor to D&D 4e. The game features crunchy combat where all of your attacks hit (but may not hit very well) and you're encouraged to push your luck to rack up more victories before resting — but it also includes rules that encourage roleplay, like detailed downtime activities that could play back into your adventure (rather just saying you spent your downtime making healing potions and leaving it at that). The game has a lot of interesting features for those who enjoy (or at least aren't opposed to) tactical combat. But at Blizzard Watch, we're gearing up to play Outgunned Adventure, a pulp action adventure that aims to capture the cinematic feel of movies like The Mummy or Indiana Jones. You'll be able to catch us playing it next week's Tavern Watch, but right now we're still reading up on this variant of Outgunned, a system that homes in on making your tabletop games feel like an action movie.

And Critical Role keeps making news, with new details about the upcoming Campaign 4, which will be GM'd by fan-favorite Brennan Lee Mulligan. He's taken the reins of the game a couple of times before for short series, but this time he'll be running the whole show with forever DM Matt Mercer getting the chance to play a long-term campaign. (Fellow DMs know how rare this is.) The new campaign features a supersized cast including all of the original CR crew as well as a bunch of new faces. It will be a West Marches style game, in which three different adventuring parties set out in the new world Aramán with stories that run concurrently and could intertwine. The campaign kicks off on October 2, 2025.

Music from this episode is "Midnight Tale" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we’re wrapping up our game of Rebel Scum, a game of anti-fascist space opera that seems a lot like Star Wars — so of course we just used it to play in the Star Wars universe! When an overwhelmingly powerful fascist Empire threatens those who want to see a better future for those around them and for the rest of the galaxy, what do you do? You fight back, you fight hard, and you don’t stop until you win.

Join GM Phil Ulrich as the crew of the Furious Tooka makes their way to a hidden base on the other side of the moon of Salient II. That’s no m–no, wait, that’s a moon, with a perfectly ordinary secret Imperial base on it. Here’s our cast of characters:

• Chris as Varin Jayne (Rogue/Vanguard), a Corellian with a starship who maybe was in it just for profit to start with but maybe — just maybe — has a heart of gold buried down in there. If he sounds familiar to you, no he doesn’t.
• Mitch as TB-WN2 (Robot/Fighter), a former assassin droid who has given up his life of killing for good. Instead, he brings a delightful accent, a calm demeanor, and a weird array of shapeshifting abilities to bear.
• Liz as Mia (Revolutionary/Expert), who is very definitely just an ordinary starship mechanic and definitely not a spy and elite hacker in the service of the Rebellion. Why would you even think that? You have some wild ideas, stranger.
• Joe as YHA-U, aka “Yeehaw” (Robot/Tank), a good-natured former mining droid who now fights to break the chains — and necks — of tyranny.
• Matt as The Orphan (Ronin/Fighter), a Wookiee and former Jedi Padawan who looks like he’s been in a lot of fights and narrowly won them; he’s a problem solver, as long as the problem can be solved with violence.

This is the third in a three-part game of Rebel Scum! Look for new episodes of all our games every Monday.

This game was played with the second edition of Rebel Scum from 9th Level Games, a game of laser swords, space combat, and fighting back against space fascists trying to put their boots on your collective necks. If you’re interested in getting this easy-to-learn game for yourself — it’s powered by the Polymorph system much like our prior games of Pigeon’s 11 and Sentai & Sensibility, meaning it’s lightweight and narrative focused — you can pick up the digital copy from 9th Level’s itch.io page for the game, or in print (with free PDF!) directly from 9th Level Games.

The music in this podcast is “Fanfare for Space” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're continuing our game of Rebel Scum, a game of anti-fascist space opera that seems a lot like Star Wars -- so of course we just used it to play in the Star Wars universe! When an overwhelmingly powerful fascist Empire threatens those who want to see a better future for those around them and for the rest of the galaxy, what do you do? You fight back, you fight hard, and you don't stop until you win.

Join GM Phil Ulrich as we follow the crew of the Furious Tooka on their quest to free the overworked, underpaid, and Empire-oppressed workers of the miners of the Salient System.

Their target? Some Gamorrean grunt named Flegg who seems to be the key to the disappearance of their contact. Or was his name Greg? Maybe Blerg? Look, names are hard. Here's our cast of characters:

• Chris as Varin Jayne (Rogue/Vanguard), a Corellian with a starship who maybe was in it just for profit to start with but maybe — just maybe -- has a heart of gold buried down in there. If he sounds familiar to you, no he doesn't.
• Mitch as TB-WN2 (Robot/Fighter), a former assassin droid who has given up his life of killing for good. Instead, he brings a delightful accent, a calm demeanor, and a weird array of shapeshifting abilities to bear.
• Liz as Mia (Revolutionary/Expert), who is very definitely just an ordinary starship mechanic and definitely not a spy and elite hacker in the service of the Rebellion. Why would you even think that? You have some wild ideas, stranger.
• Joe as YHA-U, aka "Yeehaw" (Robot/Tank), a good-natured former mining droid who now fights to break the chains -- and necks -- of tyranny.
• Matt as The Orphan (Ronin/Fighter), a Wookiee and former Jedi Padawan who looks like he's been in a lot of fights and narrowly won them; he's a problem solver, as long as the problem can be solved with violence.

This is the second in a three-part game of Rebel Scum! If you missed the first episode, you can listen to that here. Look for new episodes every Monday.

This game was played with the second edition of Rebel Scum from 9th Level Games, a game of laser swords, space combat, and fighting back against space fascists trying to put their boots on your collective necks. If you're interested in getting this easy-to-learn game for yourself -- it's powered by the Polymorph system much like our prior games of Pigeon's 11 and Sentai & Sensibility, meaning it's lightweight and narrative focused -- you can pick up the digital copy from 9th Level's itch.io page for the game, or in print (with free PDF!) directly from 9th Level Games.

The music in this podcast is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're playing a game of Rebel Scum, a game of anti-fascist space opera that seems a lot like Star Wars -- so of course we just used it to play in the Star Wars universe! When an overwhelmingly powerful fascist Empire threatens those who want to see a better future for those around them and for the rest of the galaxy, what do you do? You fight back, you fight hard, and you don't stop until you win.

Join GM Phil Ulrich as I take the crew of the Crew of the Furious Tooka through an adventure on the frontiers of civilized space to hunt down a missing union organizer and Rebellion contact. Here's our cast of characters:

• Chris as Varin Jayne (Rogue/Vanguard), a Corellian with a starship who maybe was in it just for profit to start with but maybe -- just maybe -- has a heart of gold buried down in there. If he sounds familiar to you, no he doesn't.
• Mitch as TB-WN2 (Robot/Fighter), a former assassin droid who has given up his life of killing for good. Instead, he brings a delightful accent, a calm demeanor, and a weird array of shapeshifting abilities to bear.
• Liz as Mia (Revolutionary/Expert), who is very definitely just an ordinary starship mechanic and definitely not a spy and elite hacker in the service of the Rebellion. Why would you even think that? You have some wild ideas, stranger.
• Joe as YHA-U, aka "Yeehaw" (Robot/Tank), a good-natured former mining droid who now fights to break the chains -- and necks -- of tyranny.
• Matt as The Orphan (Ronin/Fighter), a Wookiee and former Jedi Padawan who looks like he's been in a lot of fights and narrowly won them; he's a problem solver, as long as the problem can be solved with violence.

This is the first in a three-part game of Rebel Scum! Look for new episodes every Monday.

This game was played with the second edition of Rebel Scum from 9th Level Games, a game of laser swords, space combat, and fighting back against space fascists trying to put their boots on your collective necks. If you're interested in getting this easy-to-learn game for yourself -- it's powered by the Polymorph system much like our prior games of Pigeon's 11 and Sentai & Sensibility, meaning it's lightweight and narrative focused -- you can pick up the digital copy from 9th Level's itch.io page for the game, or in print (with free PDF!) directly from 9th Level Games.

The music in this podcast is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's Tavern Watch Podcast, we dig into the disaster of Diamond Comic Distributors, which filed for bankruptcy in January and is now trying to claim books in its inventory are its property, to be sold to pay off creditors. This includes comics and books it was holding on consignment, to distribute for companies that aren't paid until the books are sold in retail stores — and the loss could be crushing for small press publishers who could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of books. Green Ronin Publishing is crowdfunding to cover legal fees to fight the move, which it calls "a dire financial threat to our company." Let's hope small press can score a victory here.

In brighter news, we discuss the recent trend of "rules light" games, the delay to D&D's upcoming Eberron book, and Evil Hat continuing to work on a Tomb Raider-style game after parting ways with Crystal Dynamics. Add that to the list of games we're looking forward to playing (which is already pretty long).

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we continue our adventure of Daggerheart, as our crew becomes the first to enter the towering spire that is the Motherboard. While it's forbidden by the church, delving into these untouched halls may be the only way to save the Motherboard — and perhaps the entire Echo Vale. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

Join GM Liz Harper as I attempt to guide a motley crew of adventurers through the Echo Vale! Here's our cast of characters:

• Joan as Lithyen of Redcanyon (Rogue), a faun who lost her family at the hands of cultists obsessed with technology. She now travels alongside those who rescued her.
• Matt as Ishvit (Brawler playtest), a young giant, raised in isolated ruins. She's looking for her way in the world after losing her dwarven foster family.
• Nick as Tavin (Seraph), a human priest who has pledged himself to the Motherboard, but his faith was shaken when he met a supposed worshipper who used the faith to steal and kill.
• Phil as Laplace Cadmus (Warlock playtest), an elf who narrowly survived an attack on his group of pilgrims with the help of a mysterious voice in the network (and also Tavin).

This is the last in a three-part game of a Daggerheart game in the Motherboard setting! If you haven't, start by listening to the first episode and second episode of this game. Look for new episodes every Monday — next week we'll be covering the latest tabletop news, and then we'll be starting another game!

Daggerheart is the latest game from Darrington Press and the team at Critical Role — we're all still learning the rules of this game, so please apologize our mistakes! Increasing the chaos, two of our party were trying out playtest classes: Brawler for Matt and Warlock for Phil. You can find details on these classes (and more playtest content) on Daggerheart'swebsite. If you want to follow along and/or see where we went wrong, you can read all of the rules in the completely free SRD. The print book is sold out (though check with your FLGS if you're interested in a copy), but if you enjoyed our game you can buy Daggerheart digital copies from Demiplane and DriveThruRPG.

This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we continue our adventure of Daggerheart, as our crew walks away from the settlement surrounding the Motherboard and into a not entirely unexpected ambush. Or maybe it's a reverse ambush? Well, you'll have to listen to see all of that works out, as our party searches for a way into the hidden heart of the Motherboard herself.

Join GM Liz Harper as I attempt to guide a motley crew of adventurers through this adventure! Here's our cast of characters:

• Joan as Lithyen of Redcanyon (Rogue), a faun who lost her family at the hands of cultists obsessed with technology. She now travels alongside those who rescued her.
• Matt as Ishvit (Brawler playtest), a young giant, raised in isolated ruins. She's looking for her way in the world after losing her dwarven foster family.
• Nick as Tavin (Seraph), a human priest who has pledged himself to the Motherboard, but his faith was shaken when he met a supposed worshipper who used the faith to steal and kill.
• Phil as Laplace Cadmus (Warlock playtest), an elf who narrowly survived an attack on his group of pilgrims with the help of a mysterious voice in the network (and also Tavin).

This is the second in a three-part game of a Daggerheart game in the Motherboard setting! If you haven't, start by listening to the first episode of this game. Look for new episodes every Monday.

Daggerheart is the latest game from Darrington Press and the team at Critical Role — we're all still learning the rules of this game, so please apologize our mistakes! Increasing the chaos, two of our party were trying out playtest classes: Brawler for Matt and Warlock for Phil. You can find details on these classes (and more playtest content) on Daggerheart'swebsite. If you want to follow along and/or see where we went wrong, you can read all of the rules in the completely free SRD. The print book is sold out (though check with your FLGS if you're interested in a copy), but if you enjoyed our game you can buy Daggerheart digital copies from Demiplane and DriveThruRPG.

This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're playing a game of Daggerheart, largely because I was enchanted by the Motherboard setting in the book — a funny turn of phrase, since the setting has no magic! In the Echo Vale, civilization has been reborn in the ruins of the old world, repurposing the technology of people long gone. But the robotic creatures roaming the valley have been stirred into a wild fury, and the Prophet of the Motherboard thinks our party may be able to help.

Join GM Liz Harper as I attempt to guide a motley crew of adventurers through this adventure! Here's our cast of characters:

• Joan as Lithyen of Redcanyon (Rogue), a faun who lost her family at the hands of cultists obsessed with technology. She now travels alongside those who rescued her.
• Matt as Ishvit (Brawler playtest), a young giant, raised in isolated ruins. She's looking for her way in the world after losing her dwarven foster family.
• Nick as Tavin (Seraph), a human priest who has pledged himself to the Motherboard, but his faith was shaken when he met a supposed worshipper who used the faith to steal and kill.
• Phil as Laplace Cadmus (Warlock playtest), an elf who narrowly survived an attack on his group of pilgrims with the help of a mysterious voice in the network (and also Tavin).

This is the first in a three-part game of Daggerheart! Look for new episodes every Monday.

Daggerheart is the latest game from Darrington Press and the team at Critical Role — we're all still learning the rules of this game, so please apologize our mistakes! Increasing the chaos, two of our party were trying out playtest classes: Brawler for Matt and Warlock for Phil. You can find details on these classes (and more playtest content) on Daggerheart'swebsite. If you want to follow along and/or see where we went wrong, you can read all of the rules in the completely free SRD. The print book is sold out (though check with your FLGS if you're interested in a copy), but if you enjoyed our game you can buy Daggerheart digital copies from Demiplane and DriveThruRPG.

This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a new week of drama in the TTRPG community, and we're here to dig into the latest news. We talk about the controversy surrounding the game Rebel Scum, a Star Wars-alike that was recently removed from DriveThruRPG after complaints about the game's political messaging. Surprise: Star Wars itself is pretty political, and the game takes it from there in what it calls an "antifascist space opera." (We may be checking the game out ourselves soon!) In other gaming news, Darrington Press continues to make waves by adding both Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford to the staff after both left Wizards of the Coast earlier this year. Perkins will serve as the company's Creative Director and Crawford as Game Director, and we may start to see their influence on the continuing development of just-released Daggerheart or new games.

And Daggerheart is certainly continuing to grow: while no new books have been announced, there are four classes, six ancestries, and six backgrounds currently in playtesting, suggesting the team isn't slowing down. But D&D has been releasing a lot of play testing content recently, too, and we discussed seven Arcana-focused subclasses you can currently find as Unearthed Arcana (but I'm still quietly waiting for the revised Eberron book coming out in August). Starfinder 2e is also getting closer to launch, with its tech class playtest wrapping up before the full book comes out at the end of July. Plus, Final Fantasy becomes the best selling Magic: The Gathering set of all time, some of the great 5e compatible games you can play (including some available directly on D&D Beyond), and some great features in the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide from Kobold Press.

If you enjoy the show, please support us on Patreon, where you can get these episodes early and ad-free!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.