PAX Unplugged 2025 Recap
This past weekend I attended PAX Unplugged for the third time, a con that I highly recommend as it is a very fun mix of board games and roleplaying games.
My General Strategy for 2025 PAX Unplugged
My goal this year was to spend time playing with my fellow designers who have been long standing internet acquaintances or friends. So many people had decided to attend this year who the chances of spending time together in this lifetime are likely to be low. We arranged games ahead of time and reserved tables before the con. Special thanks to Prismatic Wasteland for managing the executive function of reserving tables! It made everything much easier and helped me to have a clear plan for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, as I knew I was going to the woods on Sunday. Yochai Gal, Derek, and I, being close friends, aimed to spend what time we could together as well. I knew I wanted to play games, eat good food, drink water, go to bed at a reasonable time each night and I planned accordingly.
General Advice for Attending PAX Unplugged
- If you are planning on attending PAX Unplugged, I highly recommend arriving Thursday if you are able. It makes it much easier to experience the convention in full.
- Pace yourself. You cannot experience everything. I might hazard that the convention is best experienced if you are of the more introverted sort by balancing fun, hydration, eating good food, and prioritizing sleep. The temptation can be to keep going way too late, and if you do that regularly and can sustain it, great. I know I need a lot of sleep to be functional so I ended up going to bed at 9:30/10 every night and it was great.
- Don't spend too much time on the show floor if your priority is playing games. Plan your games ahead of time and reserve tables.
- Know what is important to you and do that. This year my goal was: games with my fellow indie rpg pals. In 2024, I spent the entire convention playing tricktaking games with Awkward Turtle and BRSTF along with their pals who I play Blood on the Clocktower. It was great!
Highlights of What I Played
I spent the entire convention with my good friend and creative collaborator Derek B. who you may know from editing Cairn 2E and doing developmental editing on several of my projects, most recently Orestruck. He blogged extensively about the games we played in here. I'll highlight some games here but he did a more extensive write up.
Paranoia Hack
GM: Chris McDowall, Players: Josh, Sandro, Ian/Benign Brown Beast(https://beast.blot.im/), and Alex.
My notes from this game: the players were all amnesiac soldier/civil servants to a computer that ran all functions. Society was divided into social classes based on colors (we were Reds). My character was DEX-R-MOP-4, an extra clone of Derek's clone model produced by accident and so we shared an action pool of "XP" that we could use to trigger actions via secret index cards we would pass to Chris. I immediately decided to go chaos mode, not knowing that Derek and I were attempting to accomplish the same goals, convincing all other players that a robot named Sparky was a disloyal rogue that must be destroyed, a goal I eventually accomplished with Derek's help. We as a party had to deliver a "Sandwich" which was an item unknown to us. Chris provided little pins that were our roles for the Troubleshooter team as well as fun character sheets and old paperwork that we had to fill out due to the bureaucracy of the society. It was utterly delightful. I am not familiar with Paranoia but considering it is Chris, I assume it was the idea of the game cut to the bone to focus on the key elements without any extraneous unnecessary rule complexities. The game had a very dry humor that was delightful.
Stag Lord's Sanctum
GM: Derek B. Players: me, Alex, Matt (a nice congoer), and Clayton
I'm the development editor for this new module by Derek B., so in this game I sat back for most of it unless it was a new section I was not familiar with from my first passthrough a few months ago. I sat in primarily to see where are the points of excitement, confusion, what can be punched up and what do players tend to fixate on. Derek and I ended up sitting together to debrief at breakfast the next morning. It's essentially an adventure focused on faerie and a mystery cult, and power and exploitation. It's an exciting project so stay tuned for more on that.
Secret Cairn Project
GM: Me, Amanda P. Players: Derek B., Joseph R. Lewis, Kati, Rachel, and Josh.
I've been working for the past year on and off on a new adventure module for Cairn focused on desire, control, and power, exploring the idea of mystery cults. If you follow me on social media, you've probably seen that I have been reading and watching a ton of books and videos on that subject matter. It's been for this project, a site-based dungeon and surrounding environ intended to be a 1-2 shot. The players chose a hook focused on removing a violent demagogue and the playtest providing me with ample feedback to revise the opening social situation to ensure the party gets going into the monastery much sooner. The players infiltrated the monastery and explored, seeking their quarry and discovering secrets I did not think they would find, entering through the most difficult entrance. More on this soon, but it was fantastic to play with everyone.
Break!!
My final roleplaying game of PAX was a game of Break!! led by Reynaldo, the co-creator, with Prismatic Wasteland, Sandro, Derek B., Alex, and Josh. We encountered a corrupt wizard focused on information gathering, rescued a knight and briefly held and lost a magical pillow. Josh and I's characters were two goblins from the same hatching, mine being Crunch, a goblin champion wearing ragged finery and a Shakespearean ruff collar. This game was hilarious, with Reynaldo being a truly funny GM.
Closing Thoughts
I'd been feeling a bit burnt out lately due to life and playing with my friends really reinvigorated my creative energy. I don't get to play in person as often as I would like due to life, playing mostly online, but this was a great reminder of how much I enjoy it.
My next convention will be GaryCon. I need to register if I am running any games by December 1st. What should I run? I don't know.