PAX Unplugged 2025 Convention Report
Introduction
Hello again, Gentle Reader. I am back from PAX Unplugged (PAXU) and this year I feel compelled to write a little bit about my experiences. PAXU is a great convention because it has a little bit of everything: board games, TTRPGs, cosplay, etc. I participated in several TTRPG sessions, met a lot of friends that previously I had only known online, spent an unwise amount of money on RPG products, was terrorized with sea monsters and sharks at the behest of Prismatic Wasteland and Chris McDowall, and ate an inordinate amount of Asian cuisine.
I will detail at least 3 out of the 5 of those things.
Play Reports
This year, a lot of OSR bloggers/designers I know decided to all go to PAXU and so we ran some games for each other. Credit for organizing this belongs to Warren of the Prismatic Wasteland blog. I won't bother detailing all of the games that were run, only the ones I participated in, but I'm sure others will be around to elaborate on those.
I'm also not going to get too caught up in the details because:
- There are four sessions to detail.
- I didn't take detailed notes because we were in crowded and very loud convention rooms. The lone exception being Amanda P.'s session, but those were focused less on the events and more on the fact that I am doing developmental editing on the adventure module that was being playtested.
Session 1: Paranoia Hack Run By Chris McDowall
Chris had so many great props for this game. He had actual forms we had to fill out when doing certain things.
Chris McDowall ran a hack of Paranoia that, from what I understand, cut away anything he felt was unnecessary to the experience. Knowing Chris's games the way I do, I suspect that is very close to the bone indeed. We were all newly-promoted Troubleshooters who were given a mission to find and deliver a "sandwich", which we had never seen before, to a certain individual with Green level clearance. The problem was we didn't have Green level clearance, so we couldn't actually read the location of the individual on the screen.
Also what is a sandwich made out of, exactly? Our vat-grown members of a dystopian society had no idea!
In addition to our main mission, each PC has a Service Group they are officially a member of and a Secret Society they are clandestinely a member of, not to mention a R&D Prototype they are supposed to find a use for and a Team Role such as Team Leader or Loyalty Officer. A significant part of the session is not spent trying to accomplish the main mission, but instead accomplish all of your various open and secret objectives. These various memberships and responsibilities create competing motivations for the party, and it can be difficult to tell what is motivating a PC's often erratic actions at any given time.
For instance, my PC was DEX-R-MOP-3, an open member of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a secret member of the Frankenstein Destroyers. My CPU goal was to identify paper gaps where new forms might be designed to improve a process, but my Secret Society goal was to ensure that the surviving troubleshooting team was left with no bots or androids (secret bots) among our retinue.
We almost immediately picked up a bot companion by the name of Sparky, who was obsessed with power efficiency within Alpha Complex (the game setting). Given my secret society allegiance, I couldn't let that stand. Luckily I had a partner in Amanda P., who through sheer happenstance ended up playing a clone of my PC: DEX-R-MOP-4. Amanda and I are friends and frequent collaborators, so we immediately put our heads together and began plotting Sparky's destruction. Well, once we figured out we were really the same person and one of us didn't have a different secret society membership, anyway.
First, we spent some XP to turn the lights off and then more XP to implicate Sparky in the crime. Every PC starts with 5 XP (though Amanda and I had to share our XP on account of being the same person). You may spend it to pull strings within either your service group or secret society. So the power outage was the purview of CPU, but the bot-framing was a result of Frankenstein Destroyers membership. Sadly, despite our attempts to frame Sparky, other members of our team were loathe to part with him.
The finer details of the session are mostly a blur to me, as everyone struggled to accomplish their various objectives while also locating a means of acquiring a "sandwich" despite only having seen a 80's style computer rendering of one. In the end, Amanda and I were able to sabotage Sparky repeatedly by having one of us use our light manipulation mutation to fake power outages while the other continued to frame Sparky for crimes before finally resorting to damaging him directly. Did I mention that everyone is a secret mutant? Everyone is a secret mutant.
We finally managed to do in Sparky by letting him be volunteered for a loyalty test while he had a substance in his metal chassis that causes mutations. He did not pass.
In the end, after many repeated attempts of trying to manufacture a sandwich ourselves, a PC miraculously produced one through a means I am still unsure of. Amanda used the last of our XP to obtain the location of the intended sandwich recipient, and we completed our mission after a really fraught tube ride and engineering an office desk dispute that ended in a brawl.
The intended sandwich recipient was dead when we broke into his office, but who cares? We delivered the sandwich and lived to Troubleshoot another day.
At the end of the game, players go through all of their various objectives, both public and private, and whichever player accomplished the most wins. Amanda and I were able to do all 5 and so we won!
Then Amanda's clone was eliminated because it was only produced due to a clerical error. Tragic.
If this all sounds like a chaotic mess, that's because it was! But it was actually so easy to pick the game up and play an exciting session with literally no exposure to the rules prior to playing. Chris was an amazing GM, quick on his feet and effortlessly juggling stated player actions and secret notes passed to him. It was such a fun and consistently funny session, and I hope to one day see Chris turn his talents towards making his own "Paranoia as I imagined it" in the same way that Mythic Bastionland does for Pendragon.
The Paranoia Hack Crew. Starting from the selfie taker and working our way around clockwise: Josh McCrowell of His Majesty the Worm/Rise Up Comus, Ian of Benign Brown Beast, Alex of Blog of Forlorn Encystment, me (Derek B.), Warren of Prismatic Wasteland, Amanda P. of Tannic/Weird Wonder, Chris "Bastionland" McDowall, and Sandro A.D. of Fail Forward.
Session 2: Stag Lord's Sanctum
Clayton of Explorers Design being subjected to the wild gesticulations that occur whenever I explain things.
My blog has been a bit more inactive than is usual for several months, and that is because I began working in earnest on a module for Cairn called Stag Lord's Sanctum. It has very humble origins, and has gone through several playtests and revisions as it has transitioned from a simple reskin and rekeying effort to an original module in its own right.
This PAXU gave me the chance to playtest the newest version of it with seasoned bloggers and designers and I did not want to miss the opportunity. I had five players in all: Amanda P. (who is doing Dev. Editing for the module), Clayton of Explorers Design, Ian of Benign Brown Beast, Alex of the Blog of Forlorn Encystment, and a fellow named Matt from the Cairn Discord. I pregenerated characters using Kettlewright so that I could maximize play time. This was my first time running a session in a convention hall, and I wanted to ensure I could keep session length reasonable due to the strain on my attention span that crowded environments produce.
Players chose pregens and then I gave them one of three hooks to choose from. Once they selected one, the other ones effectively don't exist for the purposes of deciding how successful their delve was. In a sandbox campaign, they can be seeded in appropriate locations and PCs can potentially attempt to cash in with multiple patrons, or do multiple delves, but for one-shot delves I like to keep everyone's eye on the prize. They can also abscond with any loot they encounter and fulfill whatever player-created objectives that take their fancy along the way, of course. It's not meant as a constraint on player agency.
I'm not going to give you a long, formalized pitch for what Stag Lord's Sanctum is because this isn't intended to be promotional, but all you really need to know is that there was a Royal Huntsman that, many centuries ago, made a pact with Faerie and used their magic combined with his own hunting prowess to dominate the land and start his own mystery cult, but upon his death his cult vanished and he was largely relegated to the history books. However, something has happened recently to make people think his sanctum has been unsealed. That's where the PCs come in.
For the sake of spoilers I won't get much more specific than that, but I started them outside the dungeon with the following hook: "A reclusive scholar wishes to learn more about Faerie and has offered 150gp for a Fae-crafted object and an additional 800gp for the means to travel there."
They quickly made their way inside the dungeon, solved puzzles and avoided traps, got very lucky with Dungeon Event rolls, and ended up over the head and having to flee the dungeon with only the "Fae-crafted object" portion of their objective completed. I like hooks to have primary objectives that pay out the big bucks and secondary objectives that are more like consolation prizes because it is a way that players can evaluate how well they successfully delved the dungeon.
In the end, only one of the PCs was claimed as tribute by Faerie, though they were able to escape due to an item they stole from the sanctum beforehand.
Overall, I am really happy with how the session went. My players were a combination of clever and lucky, using their Backgrounds and starting items in advantageous ways, and their actions showed me not only what I had done well but where further refinements can take place.
Session 3: Amanda P.'s Secret Cairn Module Playtest
Amanda P. in their happy place.
My friend and collaborator Amanda P. ran an early draft of an adventure module they wrote for Cairn and I was lucky enough to get to be a player in it. It's not the first time I have playtested one of their modules, but it is the first time I have been able to do so in-person as a player.
Our objective was to find our way inside an ancient temple in the middle of a religious conclave and either:
- make sure a guy who is a member of the cult never returns home (by any means necessary)
or
- Investigate and uncover a smuggling ring involving temple officials and the black market.
Naturally, we chose murder. In order to accomplish our foul deed, however, we had to find a means to access the temple. Early on, we encountered someone who was clearly a nefarious type who offered to get us across the river to the temple under the cover of darkness. I have a natural tendency towards caution when I play OSR games, but when I playtest I embrace my inner agent of chaos and try to see how resistant a scenario is to what I call "aggressive shenanigans". Sadly, the other players were more sensible and did not like my plan to use fireworks to set a tent on fire and steal a boat in the confusion.
In the end, we navigated a web of social desires, making friends and enemies in the process, and managed to cross the river with some items that would help us impersonate initiates of the temple. No one designs social situations like Amanda P., and having a NPC appetizer before the Dungeon main course was a pretty satisfying experience.
After crossing the river, we found a hidden entrance that was guarded and used a bucket full of rocks tied to a rope to knock one of them out while the other one contracted an unfortunate case of being stabbed by Josh McCrowell's Greenwise before he could alert his compatriots.
The bucket full of rocks idea was courtesy of Joseph R. Lewis's wife Rachel, and earned her the MVP status in my books.
We infiltrated the temple, met a former inhabitant in a most unusual form, were fiercely hugged by terrible undead, and killed a temple guard who was asked for a code phrase and got code steel instead. We ended our session having found a secret room and more than a few hints as to what was really going on.
I am being deliberately vague, because much like my module there is the potential that some people reading this may one day want to be players for someone running the module at their table. I will say, however, that this group was an absolute blast to play with and I found myself staying in-character a lot more than I do in a normal OSR session as a player. Joseph R. Lewis is just an absolute force of nature at the table, and his fast-talking Scrivener was cracking me up even as I derived quiet satisfaction every time Josh's Greenwise became in-character exasperated with my character as I exclaimed, on multiple occasions, "What can go wrong?".
The Amanda P. Crew. From left to right (only detailing previously unseen people): Joseph R. Lewis of Dungeon Age Adventures, (behind Joe) Kati of The Play Reports, and Joe's wife Rachel.
Amanda P. also demonstrated great improv skills whenever some of the starting Background items allowed us to do really unexpected things, like see the memories of people whose blood we have taken and the ability to speak with animals. Though I am a long-time Forever GM, I always enjoy the opportunity to be a player because of what I can pick up from watching others behind the screen.
Session 4: Break!! Adventure Playtest
Reynaldo, creator of Break!!, can be seen here. He does not yet understand the utter madness we were about to inflict upon his adventure scenario.
I was looking forward to this session so much, and Reynaldo did not disappoint! We were allowed to make Rank 2 characters for this session, and I did a rare thing for me and decided on my character concept before rolling everything else randomly. I ended up with a Bio-Mechanoid Battle Prince named QU1X-073 (pronounced Quixote), a Bio-mechanoid found and repaired by a field researcher who liked to collect tales of chivalry from the Other World.
Reynaldo used a very hard framing device, giving us the background of our party and our mission before putting us in a pretty terrible predicament and asking us to work our way out of it. Work our way out we did, a little too well, as Josh and Amanda's Goblins improvised a device that let us bypass an entire floor of a dungeon that we were intended to conquer the old-fashioned way.
We proceeded to smash demons, gleefully trigger traps, and befriend Chib thieves with surprisingly complicated inner lives. The vibes were Saturday morning cartoons mixed with Dragon Ball, and I mean that as an absolute compliment. Break!! is a crunchier, more OC-friendly system than I tend to go for, but it was an absolute blast to play and I would do it again in a heartbeat.
In the end, we negotiated with the Demon Overlord, exchanged a priceless belonging of his (a magical pillow. You'd have to have been there) for the cure for various curses our patron and party members were inflicted with, and then everyone humored me and let me Rocket Punch him anyway.
A very cinematic combat ensued, and in the end we were victorious.
I'm including this unflattering picture of me going full squint-smile because it is one of the few I have from when Norn Noszka (@nornnoszka), Tabletop Arteest, graced us with their presence. Also, look at the scarf game Reynaldo is rocking!
Reynaldo was such a great GM, with excellent voices and very skilled in balancing his incredibly large player group. As for the players, we all got very in-character and did some truly unhinged things in our quest for glory.
Pre and Post-Game Highlights
I swear, Yochai was happy to see us.
In addition to games, it was nice to have a chance to hang out with my friends Amanda P. and Yochai Gal, who I was lucky enough to do PAXU with two years ago. Unfortunately, Yochai had to leave early, but what time we got with him was welcome. Amanda and I took the opportunity to do session debriefs/developmental editing sessions after each of our playtests, and it was so nice to be able to do that in person with a map between us instead of over Discord.
I also met so many people face-to-face who previously I had only known through places like Discord and Bluesky. Everyone was an absolute delight, and it was nice to meet up for meals and chat about OSR games, have philosophical disagreements about Saves and Checks, and discuss the proper wetness level of walnuts (long story).
Great little game.
I also played some good old-fashioned board games while I was at PAX. One of them, Wriggle Roulette by Oink Games, I liked so much I purchased it. It's a very simple Push Your Luck game where you are racing to see who can earn 20+ points first by drawing enough eels without so many snakes you cause an "outbreak". I have played it twice with my kids so far and it has been a big hit. It didn't hurt that it was small enough to fit into my carry-on either.
Surprisingly fun little game. Analog Mario Party vibes as far as how much you can frustrate other players or be nice.
My favorite board game experience, though, was playing Survive! Escape From Atlantis with Chris McDowall and Warren of Prismatic Wasteland. Chris was kind enough to teach us the game as we played, though he had us on the ropes for most of the game until a few late-game maneuvers resulted in Warren's victory and me not completely embarrassing myself by actually managing to get 2nd place.
You can see Chris is already plotting the demise of Warren and myself the next time we meet on the cardboard of battle.
What's the takeaway? I dunno. Playing TTRPGS is fun? Talking with friends who like TTRPGS as much as you do is great? If you've never gone to a convention before, find some people to go with. Ask around in your online communities and do a meet-up. I like PAXU, and I hope to do it again next year.
Maybe I will see you there.