PAX Unplugged 2025 - Part 1
PAX Unplugged has become a favorite event. This is my second year attending, and while it was a bit more chaotic due to the overlap with the Philadelphia Marathon, I had a blast.
My partner and I drove up from Northern Virginia. The traffic wasn’t ideal, and we arrived a full hour or so later than intended on Thursday. But we managed to pick up our badges, have dinner and briefly see friends who got in early, and then prepare for Friday’s chaos.
Friday
See, this year I decided I wanted to try to focus on trawling through the expo hall for TTRPGs that were solo/GMless 2 playable/duel or duet games in style. I streamed The Conservatory by Devin Nelson a few months back and it went so well I decided to make this a series. Playing TTRPGs with chat is something I can navigate; tech production and schedule wrangling for 3-6 players for larger games not so much. It also felt like a good chance to showcase indie TTRPGs that might not necessarily get the attention.
So, with that goal in mind, I bought a wireless mic a few weeks back and also determined to try my hand at video interviews.
Shoutout to moreblueberries for being my first interview! They explained A Land Once Magic by Viditya Voleti so well, and that is high on the list of games I want to play with my chat soon—and I think a series name has been settled upon: Chaos, Casts, and Chats! Courtesy of lovely friend and mod amalea! But first, before that point, let me try to start from the beginning and deliver this chronologically. Results my vary.
Thanksgiving crashed through the sequence of events after PAXU, which means I am finishing this up on the capitalism holiday (Black Friday) and my memory of things is fast becoming a blur. Then I took the weekend off to rest a bit before aggregating everything and properly posting this today!
Now, while I planned to wander around the expo hall on Friday asking people about their games and wares (which I only haphazardly did by the end of the con), I also had a list of things I wanted to buy before going into creator mode.
The things I bought
I got a snowy owlbear (very adorably named Snowy Crystal now by chat and, again, amalea who we have established is the best at naming things) last year, but saw the green one and knew I also needed it. Please meet Verdy Fern! Snagged at the Imagining Games booth.
I also got two Yaniir necklaces and I regret nothing. They’re so prettyyyy! Dice jewelry is probably one of my favorite inventions, thank you to whoever initially decided to make the shiny math rocks into necklaces specifically.
AND… one (1) Dispel dice Liquid Core set, the OTP set—which feels very appropriate for me.
And now, the TTRPGs!
From there I tried not to think about how much money I spent in under an hour and wandered around with Brian (urbanbohemian), wherein we made Content and kept saying it very ridiculously. Brian took a video and I kept jumping behind them like a goober. My partner took a picture of us in the middle of this. Look how professional we are.
Photo is a little blurry, but we are being extremely professional.
Brian also explained the joke in this delightful clip. Please witness them saying ✨content✨ in the deepest movie trailer-esque voice.
We wandered to the Daggerheart booth as well, which was fascinating—and the new Daggerheart: Hope and Fear expansion was being showcased. Someone please GM me a Daggerheart oneshot and/or short campaign, thank you. I’m also interested in the card stats-y element to Daggerheart, which is fun!
Then I got distracted by lunch and coffee because at a convention the normal caffeine rules are out and I get to have at least two more caffeine!! (The joys of blood pressure woes and aging).
The rest of Friday I ran back around the expo hall looking specifically for TTRPG developers and publishers and sellers that had solo/GMless/2 player TTRPGs available and tried my best to interview people. It…went okay. I need to work on my interviewing skills but it was excellent practice!
I wandered over to the Hit Point Press booth and wound up buying a Fablemakers Deck of Many Things—because one has no choice but to buy Yoshi Yoshitani art, it’s a rule. The Floral Dragon stuffs also looked amazing. I do, indeed, love dragons quite a bit and what’s not to love about dragons that are also cool floral-y creatures?
From there I met up with Sebastian Yue, who is amazing and works on a lot of awesome projects, introduced me to Gila RPGs as well as the moreblueberries booth and A Land Once Magic. Shoutout to them for hanging out briefly with me before I got overwhelmed by the expo hall and fled!! If we briefly said hi, please know it made me weekend 💜
After, as I roamed the expo hall I found the Sanshee booth. They have a lot of fun Mass Effect merch, and this time around they had a BABY KROGAN!!! Look at himmm.
From there, I properly settled into ✨ Content ✨ mode and took out my wireless mic and tried my best not to have a panic about maybe talking to people. (It is very funny to me too that I wound up in a line of work that really works best when extroverted and not full of anxiety).
I stopped by Gila RPGs to properly talk potential TTRPGs to stream, and there are so many options!! Rune, a duet version of Slayers, so so many more. I definitely plan on playing several of these on Chaos, Casts, and Chats!
Afterward, I went to the Indie Press Revolution booth—which I had gone to last year and found some pretty neat games at and wanted to see the options this year!
They have a lot of solo games, and I would love to eventually get through some of them! By then I had spent quite a bit of money (see above…that was basically a year’s worth of saving up gone in an hour—AND I REGRET NOTHING buuuut I also do not have the most disposable income).
I snagged The World We Left Behind by Samantha Leigh because the card mechanics were interesting. Like many solo/GMless TTRPGs, you use cards. But in The World We Left Behind, you draw symbols on the cards. This drew me in as a unique mechanism, and I want to see how I might be able to replicate it digitally (MS Paint mayhaps, a classic).
I wandered some more and found my way to the Plus One Exp booth. They always have awesome zines and TTRPGs of every variety and Wes Franks (Carrion Comfort, who also creates wonderful TTRPGs).
Ian took this photo to help me remember where I went and I just thought it was funny
Wes introduced me to a couple potential streaming options: BODY HAMMER by Zachary Vaudo, inspired by Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo II: Body Hammer and several other films and pieces of media in a similar vibe. I was intrigued by the concept of “play-to-lose TTRPG” on the cover. There was also Primadonna by Kyle Tam. Wes explained it to me as a game about burnout, where if you stop playing a song the world ends. Absolutely not relatable in the slightest. Nope!!!
Finally there was Superdillin’s HUNT(er/ed), which is about, well, the hunter and the hunted. Its description says it’s “a 2 player game of pursuit, determination, and what it truly means to be a monster”, which absolutely slaps.
Oh, oh, wait there was another smaller TTRPG at the book that I absolutely adore and want to show off on stream for sure—Spellbook by Infinite Citadel! I absolutely want to do a small business card/postcard/bookmark-sized TTRPG like this for 2026’s PAXU. It’d be fun! This one appeals to the book nerd and writer in me too. The sigil drawing element is so neat and creative. Absolutely enamored with this little game!
By then I was exhausted and found dinner with friends and then wandered about the Marriot lobby (where people often gather, sometimes dubbed “lobbycon”) for abouuut 45 minutes before I got too overwhelmed by the wall of sound and fled back to my hotel room for the night.
Somehow I spent most of Friday in the expo hall, but Saturday I would find even more TTRPGs I want to showcase on my new Chaos, Casts, and Chats series! Whiiich I will get into in a Part 2 soon! Because wow this post has gone on a while! I have been chipping away at what all I did and the business cards gathered over Thanksgiving week. Then I dissociated all of Black Friday and Thanksgiving weekend after, eating leftovers as nature intended. Sorry for the delay!
But before I go, have a nice little montage of photos my partner Ian took on Friday. PAXU kindly gave him a content creator badge as my production/tech crew and he really fulfilled that role well this year! So everyone go admire his photography skills.
And that’s it (for this post at least)! I will say, it will be nice to have PAXU on the first weekend of December again next year. In 2026 PAX Unplugged with be December 4-6, which starts the day after my birthday! Exciting!
But yes, thank you for reading! If you found any of these TTRPGs interesting, please go enjoy them! Part 2 will be out in a few days!
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