Tavern Watch Podcast: TTRPG travel guides and sentient marbles

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 stat block for Cthulhu, Darklord of Innsmouth — does this mean all of Massachusetts is in the Domains of Dread?

We also discuss a sorely lacking element of today’s tabletop RPG landscape, deeply in-depth city or area guides that don’t also feel the need to be an adventure module in and of themselves, and discuss graceful retirements of intellectual property and the community as stewards, in the case of Modiphius ceasing development on Achtung! Cthulhu and turning it over to the community (along with a big bundle of official art for use in your products). Also, are the marbles in Jelle’s Marble League sentient? Are they actually capable of making decisions? You make the call. (No, I don’t know what this has to do with tabletop either.)

You can listen to the podcast directly from this post or click on download icon in the upper right corner of the player below to listen on your own device.

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

For more Tavern Watch, check out all of our recent episodes! We do actual plays of a wide range of games — you can check all those out here — as well as a monthly episode on tabletop news, just like this one. Listen to our latest games in the playlist below, and subscribe if you want to keep up with our gaming exploits.

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