Phil Ulrich

One of the longstanding traditions in the Diablo franchise has been the Secret Cow Level -- or, to use its proper name in Diablo 2, the Moo Moo Farm.

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.

The World of Warcraft Midnight patch cycle is in full swing; despite some player uncertainty due to a unprecedented number of bugs in patch 12.0.5, which launched April 21, Blizzard has already announced new features for patch 12.0.7.

On Saturday over in the Blizzard Watch Discord, Anna Bell noted that the recently-released Titanium Court was “aggressively Phil U. coded.” She’s not wrong, of course; it has been on my wishlist since the demo launched a month or two ago, and an incredibly wry combination of match-3 puzzler, roguelite, and auto-battler about faerie courts trapped in a perpetual war in a surreal shifting reality, led by a queen who really just wants to go home but finds that her steward who holds all the answers is avoiding her as much as possible, is in fact squarely in my wheelhouse. Titanium Court is a game that’s not afraid to ask the big questions, like “what if you could replace intrusive thoughts with pleasant ones about baseball?” and “is the desire for a taco universal?”

And so, I launched it yesterday and lost my entire night immersed in it. I looked up and said “when did the sun go down?” Been a while since that happened. But today is a new day! So let’s set that “potion of liking baseball” in a sunny spot until it bubbles and answer some questions insetad, because this is The Queue, where we do that kind of thing.

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...

Patch 12.0.5 launched Tuesday in World of Warcraft, and while there were a lot of features players were excitedly looking forward to -- Decor Duels, Abyss Anglers, or even helping Decimus help us by finishing the Voidforge -- the patch also launched with one major thing players were not expecting or looking forward to: critical bugs that caused the Player Housing system to be disabled, at least in the US and Oceania.

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.