Naturally, within an hour of publishing my PAX Unplugged recap, I started thinking of things I forgot to include…

What I Bought: I don’t tend to buy many things at cons. I’m busy, I’m stingy, I Kickstarted it already, et cetera, et cetera. But most of all, I’ve probably seen it before. When you work five or six cons each year, it feels like you see the same things at each show. Of course, that isn’t entirely true, and I do enjoy walking the hall and seeing what’s out there. Here’s what I picked up this time around:

I backed the Mothership 1E kickstarter (and I can’t wait to have it in print soon!) but I still picked up Mothership 0E for archival purposes. This little book has made a big impact over the last few years, and deservedly so.

Lost in the Deep is a solo dwarven delve that uses the Wretched & Alone engine. The author, Diogo Nogueira, also wrote Halls of the Blood King for OSE. I read that last week and plan to review it at some point soon. I might give Lost in the Deep a go over the holidays.

Bakers, Charge! is an RPG based on the many competitive baking shows that are out there these days. My daughter particularly likes Is It Cake?, so I picked this up for her for Christmas.

Last but not least, especially if we’re considering weight and volume, is the Ghosts of Saltmarsh expansion to the WizKids Adventure System game line. I like these games. They offer a convenient “4e in a box” sort of experience with minis and nice tiles. I was holding out for the premium edition with its preprinted minis, but I couldn’t pass this up at $23, and I probably already have most of the minis from the prepainted sahuagin warband set anyway.

What I Listened To: Setting up the booth goes a lot easier with a soundtrack, and each con carries a certain mood. GenCon 2022 was the new-at-the-time Amon Amarth album the Great Heathen Army and Megadeth – Live at Wembley Arena 1990, which features the strongest songs from their first four albums and an outstanding cover of “It’s Electric” with Diamond Head singer Sean Harris on vocals. The Menza/Friedman lineup of Megadeth was such an absolute beast. I listened to Hawkwind’s “Live Chronicles” repeatedly while setting up at PAX Unplugged 2022. I like it better than the studio recording of Chronicles of the Black Sword. The mix just sits better with me and you get a broader range of songs. It opens with a spoken recitation from Michael Moorcock, and includes the lovely song “Moonglum” which never got a studio recording.

For reasons I can’t quite recall, PAX Unplugged 2023 was all Def Leppard. I have an old connection to the band, having reached my teen years just as they were reaching the heights of their stardom. Their Hysteria album was inescapable. The story behind that album is fascinating. They spent so long recording it that they needed to sell five million copies just to break even. It has sold over twenty million copies to date, with seven singles. It’s inconceivable by modern standards. I had a friend whose house I would stay at a lot back then, and I remember him buying the Hysteria cassette. I bought GnR Lies on the same trip to the Harmony House on Gratiot. Hysteria sounds like it was recorded in a space station, it’s completely bonkers with its electronic drums, guitar synths, and effects.

Def Leppard had a wealth of material recorded before they left planet Earth, and that’s what I had on repeat in Philadelphia. Their first two albums are a cross between early AC/DC, their New Wave of British Heavy Metal roots, and the hit sound the band would become famous for. Raw Marshall amps, riffs for days, and equal parts frantic, bombastic, and endlessly catchy, it’s fantastic stuff (though a bit troublesome if you wake up with it in your head at three o’clock in the morning!).

I spent a week or two after the con listening to little else, so here’s my brief guide through the early years of the biggest band from Sheffield (I assume). The Early Years 79-81 box set covers everything pre-Hysteria with the exception of Pyromania. The first two disks are the first two albums, On Through the Night and High ‘n’ Dry. I think High ‘n’ Dry is the better of the two, it has a virtually perfect recording at the hands of “Mutt” Lange, with full, raw guitars and energetic performances. There are alternate recordings of songs from the first album on the fourth disk, which collects singles and rarities, and I like those more than the album versions. The third disk is an early live set, and the fifth has a few BBC recordings. Those last two disks stand on their own, but they’re mostly for deep divers.

My favorite live recording from them is on the Pyromania deluxe CD set. The band had peaked with their loud rock sound and song writing, and while the album production is a little spacey, the live set still delivers the goods. Just check out these clips from the Pyromania tour. They’re absurd, the band is absolutely on fire.

While I Was Away: One of the friendly local game stores (the esteemed Golden Rhino Games, where I pop in once or twice a month to buy mini paints) hosts D&D Adventurers League tables on Wednesday nights, and while I was in Philadelphia, they ran an adventure I wrote. That was a neat feeling, and I wish I could have played in it or just dropped by. One of the joys of writing for an organized play campaign is that you know your stuff is really getting played and not just getting filed away in a PDF folder.

Where We Stayed: I prefer to stay at AirBNB’s on these trips to encourage camaraderie among the team (and to have an actual kitchen), but that also means having a variety of accommodations. Here’s where they put the laundry machines in our Philly spot. Gotta go somewhere, I guess!