Phil Ulrich

One of the new features coming in WoW patch 12.0.5 on April 21 is something new called the Voidforge.

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 Jewel in the Sky -- and also how when you leave fans alone with high-quality free products they'll do things like convert the core rules of Ars Magica into the easy to read and use Markdown format.

World of Warcraft's newest expansion, Midnight, just launched, but Blizzard is not content to bask in the success of what is, by all accounts, a well-received expansion launch, and the developers are already hard at work on patch 12.0.5.

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 business pitch slide deck.

Welcome back to serene Ternion City, where things are heating up in the case of the missing-then-returned-but-boneless Zbarro renovators.

I definitely did not authorize it to be Monday already. The dilemma of weekends: the more I do on the weekend, the more I feel like I need a second weekend after my weekend because I used the first one up doing stuff, but the less I do on the weekend, the more I feel like I need a second weekened because I wasted the first one.

Anyway, this is The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Grab your favorite morning beverage (I have an iced coffee, unlike the fine captain up here) and let’s get to answering some questions.

On Monday nights, after our raid ends, I like to park myself right at the Great Vault so that when I get home from work Tuesday afternoon I’m ready to log in and hopefully secure a piece of shiny new loot. This week, for the first vault of the season, I decided to wander over to the Horde-only side of Silvermoon City and see if we had a bank over there with our own Great Vault. We do, as it turns out, and I thought — you know, it’s silly, but maybe as a Horde character, I’ll have slightly better luck if I use the Horde-only Vault.

I did get some Hero-tier gloves that I can catalyze next week, and I managed to continue to evade the bug where people are getting nothing but the same item slot over and over (example: eight sets of bracers), so I guess it worked? I’ll probably continue to do this on Mondays. If baseball players can be superstitious, so can I.

Anyway, this is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where you ask questions, and we probably have answers, but we have to do a little ritual first. Just in case.

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.

If you’re not terminally online like I am — first of all, good for you, because it means you get to miss the latest Nvidia DLSS discourse. The short version is that while DLSS 1 through 4.5 were legitimate ways to improve your framerate in games via some honestly ingenius graphics card shenanigans, DLSS 5 appears to throw all that out the window in favor of taking creative control away from the graphics professionals who designed it and handing it to the same slop factories that are responsible for AI deepfake videos. The internet has reacted accordingly, while Nvidia’s CEO has decided to take the Principal Skinner “no, it’s the children who are wrong” approach to the feedback.

At least we got a bumper crop of memes out of it, right?

Anyway, this is The Queue, our daily question and answer column where we have some thoughts about generative AI, but my mom taught me that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you say it quietly with your friends instead of in public. Let’s get to it.

World of Warcraft's Midnight expansion kicked off off the second part of the Worldsoul Saga as baddie (in every sense of the word) Xal'atath invades Azeroth with an army of void creatures at her beck and call.