PAX Unplugged 2025 - Part 2
Welcome to Part 2 of my big PAX Unplugged 2025 write-up! If you missed Part 1, you can find it here. Apologies for the delay in getting part 2 up! The holiday season has been busy—and I got engaged on my birthday earlier in the month!! It was a perfect and wonderful week, and then the holidays only snowballed in hecticness, so forgive me for focusing on life things! Suddenly it’s five days until Christmas. Where has the time gone?!
But yes! As previously mentioned, PAXU was a wonderful time this year—and Saturday meant even more wandering the expo hall. While I spent a good amount of Friday hunting for TTRPGs for my upcoming stream series Chaos, Casts, and Chats, Saturday felt like I found even more amazing TTRPGs and met some lovely TTRPG developers at various booths!
But let’s start at the beginning of the morning, when loud cheering outside woke me up.
As mentioned in Part 1, the Philadelphia Marathon was at the same time as PAXU this year, which meant a lot of road closures. That wouldn’t be a huge deal—if the routes didn’t make it incredibly difficult to get from my hotel to the convention center. On Friday it wasn’t in effect yet. In fact, the half-marathon route went right in front of our hotel on Saturday and it was fun to watch people cheer the runners on. That was what woke me up: people cheering half-marathon runners on.
This would be a way bigger problem Sunday, the day of the full marathon, but I didn’t know that yet~
Saturday
Games on Demand Meet and Greet
First up, I wandered over to the Games on Demand Meet and Greet that morning with urbanbohemian. Since we’re both interested in covering more indie TTRPGs, he was kind enough to help me introduce myself to folks (because I am, as established, extremely anxious and am still working on how to introduce myself at conventions without freezing up!). This event was put together by Brian Liberge, and I’m glad it was put on my radar because I saw some pretty cool TTRPGs here and met some lovely folks!
Defy the Gods by Chris Sellers
Defy the Gods looks like a super cool game! It’s a queer sowrd & sworcery adventure-romance set in an ancient Mesopotamia. That alone will honestly get me to play anything. You can get the quick start here—and it looks like its Kickstarter was a success, so I’m excited to see this one fully in the future!
The Open Book by fadingbetty
This was a cute educational-style TTRPG where you play as Bibliomancers. Bring a book (or multiple books) and use passages in them to interpret prompts and use them as answers to questions. It’s a cute and inventive diceless system and as a writer and a reader I’m absolutely enamored with the concept!
These lovely folks were memorable because, well, goosepoop is a fun and memorable name. They also had all sorts of small and fun TTRPG: Good Soup and Honk Daddy, which were the two that stood out to me the most titles-wise, as well as many, many more.
Hinterlight by G//C
Hinterlight looked aesthetically very neat, dark gothic fairytale in vibes. You start off dead and uncover information about yourself and the fae nobility that resurrected you. It seems perfect for some collaborative gothic storytelling, and I really want to play it. Its Kickstarter just finished, and this one is going on the Chaos, Casts, and Chats to-play list!
Intergalactic Teaz by BrieAnna Allen and Bluu Smith
Brian and I spoke to Bluu about this one and it was so cool. The stats were amazing and hilarious, and I really need to be in a game of this one someday.
I wrote thiiiiis!!!
Luck of the Harbor games
Natalie Pudim is a delight, and her games are always very fun to play. Warrenguard in particular means a lot to me, it’s a dragonrider TTRPG and I got to write some epistolary entries for flavor text as well as incorporate some elements of worldbuilding surrounding dragon death. It was neat to bring some Day of the Dead components to the setting! I didn’t get the best picture, I was too busy flailing, but if you pick up the game and read Daniela Esterlinarider’s entries, those are all written by yours truly!
Saturday continued
Back to the expo hall
From there Brian had a panel to get to and I decided to wander the expo hall some more!
Godzilla RPG by IDW Games
When I saw the PR email about the Godzilla RPG, I had to check it out. It’s card based and designed for folks interested in Godzilla but are not regular TTRPG players to be able to hop into easily—which is fun, and I love TTRPGs that utilize things like deck of cards or tarot or wood blocks, etc. The creativity is always inspiring.
idk what I’m even doing here but thank you Ian for this silly photo of me talking to M. Allen Hall!
M. Allen Hall booth
I really want to play at least 2 or 3 of these—Endling is high on my list. There were so many solo/journaling games here that I can’t wait to dive into!
Triangle Agency by Haunted Table
I love everything about this game, very Weird powers and evil corporations and interesting d3 mechanics and yeah I need to play it. Have to, must, will absolutely figure out how (either on Chaos, Casts, and Chats or begging a friend or two to play it with me).
Colostle at the Imagining Games booth
Technically I saw this on Friday as well when I picked up my green owlbear, but I stopped and pondered the soloplayable Colostle game series and a few other solo TTRPGs at the Imagining Games booth properly on Saturday. I didn’t pick any up, but I am interested in trying to pick a few up at some point for stream purposes!
Good Luck Press booth
The good folks over at the Good Luck Press booth had several options. By this point I had improved explaining what I was looking for: solo/GMless/2 player games. And wow do they have some really cool stuff. There’s bookmark RPGs (my new favorite genre I didn’t know was a thing but now I do and there’s so many neat ones out there), solo journaling games, and more. I need to play The Backbone of Beasts on stream and make some strange creatures with my chat. Then I need to play Auspex, because I love tarot solo journaling/worldbuilding focused games so so much.
Storyteller Squad booth
From there, I wandered to a booth with a very cute jackalope and winged wolf friend. They were at The Storyteller Squad booth, and I had never heard of the podcast until then. At first, I resisted the siren call of cute cryptid plushies. But after waiting around by the booth for my partner (now fiancé, aaaa!!), I decided it was only reasonable to pick up the little guy as penance for me taking up so much of the nearby space! Definitely wasn’t looking for any possible excuse to buy the plushie. Nope!!
Mythworks booth
The lovely folks at the Mythworks booth did indulge my questionable “I’m looking for games to play with my chat” speech and didn’t think me a total weirdo. By this point in the day my poor anxiety—and ability to pretend to be an extrovert—was melting.
All their work is so artistic and striking. From Slugblaster (which I have been promised is super fun by several people) to CBR+PNK to Stoneburner, all their games were a delight to look at and look interesting to play! Not sure I’ll be able to play many of them on stream, but I do want to persuade some friends to play Slugblaster at the very least!
Snowbright Studio booth
This booth had cute plushies not unlike the Storyteller Squad booth—and I was pulled in by the solo games! ink in particular caught my eye and I really want to play that on stream eventually! Starting out dead and navigating a spirit world full of dangers sounds like a fun adventure to me.
Possible Worlds Games booth
Last but certainly not least, I had wonderful conversation with Tyler about the many lovely games Possible Worlds Games has produced and/or will be releasing soon! And also the conversation just made me feel better about indie TTRPG community, and why supporting and playing these games means so much to me. It was a good talk! And I can’t wait to play several of these. Beak, Feather, & Bone is high on the list to play.
Sunday
By Sunday, my partner (now fiancé !! aaa!!! yes I’m going to be screaming about that for a while) and I were set to leave early, around 10am. But we figured we’d head over to the convention center and the connected hotel where many people were hanging out. Except… the marathon blocked our way, and we had no idea how to get over.
So we left, and I felt a lot of stress and guilt over not seeing as many friends as I intended—but I do have a massive list of TTRPGs to stream! I met some lovely TTRPG creators, and I can’t wait to start Chaos, Casts, and Chats.
We did get to meet up on the way home with some lovely local-to-Philly friends near the King of Prussia mall, so Ian and I briefly wandered around for steps. That place is massive by the way, it felt like wandering a capitalism maze. But yes here we are in front of a massive Christmas tree, ready to run away from the crowds of shoppers.
And that was the end of PAXU 2025!
Thankfully next year PAX Unplugged 2026 is December 4-6 rather than overlapping with the marathon. Even better? It starts the day after my birthday. If I make a huge blog post (which is likely, these are fun to do) and there are even more treats and dice purchased? Well, birthday presents are to be expected!
And I appreciate the folks at PAXU for giving me and Ian creator badges, which allowed me to attend. In addition, I was given a small grant from Latinx in Gaming to help towards hotel costs, which were a lot more this year due to the overlap with the marathon weekend. I wouldn’t be able to attend without that support, so thank you!
Here are some more miscellaneous photos:
And that’s it for this year’s PAX Unplugged! This definitely has become my annual convention, and I can’t wait for 2026.
