PAX Unplugged 2025
PAX Unplugged has become a yearly thing for me recently, sometimes with friends, sometimes solo. So here's what I did/saw/played/got.
Some weird ass fantasy heart-breaker
A friend that came to the con with me is a big 5e guy, and wanted to play in a 5e game. Not my preferred thing, but I'll play any game. So we signed up, only for the guy to whip out his own heart-breaker, saying "It's like 5e, but...", and to be honest, I have to respect that decision. The game was very much not to my taste, like 4e D&D but with the video game "button pushing" turned up to 11. He invited my friends to play again in the morning, but I bailed. Turns out it was the right choice, because they spent two hours in the stands of a coliseum while some other players had a fight, until they just got fed up and left.
I'm choosing to mark this as a positive, since it made me realize, hey, if this guy can run a pick up game for randos, so can I!
Running my own game
I signed up to run an open game and was surprised that every slot was filled. Especially so as I wasn't running anything popular, but instead running Song of Blades and Heroes, which is, as you may know, a war game. The war game is simple enough that you can kind of just kludge it into an RPG without much of a problem, though it is a pretty battle focused one. I may blog about this more in the future, but I had a couple of ideas and how to make it all work:
- Players chose from a selection of units that were about 30 points, to keep them somewhat balanced. This gave a nice spread of heavy guys, skirmishers, thieves, wizards, and a couple of oddballs.
- Traits that have very specific war game rules still have those rules, but also exist in fiction and could be used through negotiation. For example, Distract was used to, well, distract. Acrobat let the character do acrobatic things, I let the Magic-User do various small magical effects like light up a room, etc.
- To keep things fast with regards to battle set up, it was all done on a Chessex wet-erase mat using some real minis I had and then a bunch of multi-colored meeples. Range sticks were used but mostly eyeballed.
Overall I thought it was a great success. The players were a band of mercenaries tasked with sneaking into a city under siege to assassinate their grand wizard while he slept, while creeping up his wizard tower and avoiding his strange monsters and traps. My personal touch-stones for the scenario were The Black Company and Thief: The Dark Project.
As an aside, one player gave me an extra copy of his zine, an Airship rules supplement. You can check it out and maybe get a pdf copy here: https://www.bryceltaylor.com/airships
Playing some Mausritter
My buddy was all in on Mausritter this year, and we played both the introductory adventure and Honey in the Rafters. This is old news now, but Mausritter is indeed awesome. I'm a simple man, I get a little card-stock Candy cane weapon to slot into my character sheet, and I'm happy.
Aspirational Purchases
Dragonbane Box Set
Dragonbane just looks cool to me. I read the free quick-start adventure earlier, and when I saw that the box set has both the full rules and a full sandbox campaign in it, I decided to go for it. It's a slick package, and I'd really like to get this bad boy on a physical table with some friends.
His Majesty da Woim
I was kind of on the fence about this, but my siblings, who I play TTRPGs with almost every week, mentioned wanting to play this one. That combined with a sale on the last day of the con, I went for it. I'm still reading the book, but so far it seems cool and weird (good weird, I think). Like a touchy-feely version of old-school D&D. When I finish reading it, or if I get this on the table I'd like to write down some feelings on it.
Dungeon Geomorphs
I bought a pack of Dungeon Geomorphs from the Inkwell ideas booth. Mostly because I hear Nightwick Abbey uses them to randomize the dungeon layout every visit, and I think that sounds sick as hell. Don't know if I'll ever make the geomorph megadungeon that my heart yearns for, but it's a neat little tool for my toolbox at least.