Joshua Randall
Legend
What I Did At Origins 2026
(Origins being the Midwest U.S.A. game convention that is not GenCon. Origins takes place in Columbus, Ohio, in mid June.)
Hello. My name is Joshua Randall and you might remember me from such past "What I Did At Origins" reports as the one from 2016 and holy crap, that was a decade ago.
Most of these games were played via Games on Demand as is my wont.
Players: 6 total
For as long as I can remember attending Origins there has been a 7th Sea cadre. And I've always been intrigued by the setting, which is Three Musketeers & pirates with magic. But I never pulled the trigger (haHA!) until this year.
The system has you state what you want to do, then the GM chooses the relevant Trait ("ability score") plus Skill and that determines how many d10s you roll. You then make groups of dice that add up to at least 10 and each group is one success.
You can get bonus dice in various ways, too.
Then your number of successes are used for various things including margin of success, dealing damage, and some other stuff. You can download the 7th Sea quickstart if you want details.
The world is Theah which is "not-Earth", or yes-literally- E A R T H anagrammed with an extra H and no R. Theah has recognizable analogues of Earth countries and cultures. I gather there is a complex and detailed meta-plot.
In the scenario our characters were "honorable pirates" who were sent to stop the Montaignes (the not-French) from taking control of a particular part of the Ataban Sea (the not-Caribbean). The opening was a cool setup in which our ship was in a fast-moving channel between two islands, but the Montaigne had stretched a chain across the water so if we didn't do something about it within a few "rounds" the ship would be destroyed.
One of the characters was able to aim the cannons carefully to destroy the apparatus holding the chain, but then we all leapt off the ship to fight Montaige on shore, and the ship sailed away without us and became Ship No Longer Appearing In This Adventure. Which was weird and disappointing particularly to my character who had a few ship-specific talents.
After that exciting opening the game turned into a lengthy investigation around a religious prophecy and a secret society in hiding and some miracles from the past that had present-day analogues and to be honest I had trouble following it all because it related to the meta-plot and also it was about 80 degrees in the room.
We spent so long on this investigation that we had to compress the final throwdown with the Montaigne, in which everyone unloaded every possible resource they'd been holding back (as you do in one-shots) and we were victorious. Huzzah!
The game system seemed fine for a trad game [insert Games on Demand monocle-wearing emoji here] though I'd want to play it more to see if I shouldn't just replace it with Fate when I want to get my musketeers & pirate on.
Random quote from this game that I wrote down and now don't remember what it means: "Abstract villainy - the worst kind!"
GM: Marc Majcher (the game's creator)
Players: 3 total (me, Jim, Nick)
In Marc's words, he is creating Eyes Only because his friends wanted to play Top Secret (the old TSR spy game) and Top Secret is not a good game.
Jim (one of the other players) and I had a good laugh because we both remembered an example from Top Secret in which the character needs to bluff his way past a chef and this bluff depends upon whether you should tear lettuce or cut it to make a salad. Because nothing screams exciting spy adventures more than lettuce!
In keeping with its Top Secret inspiration, your character in Eyes Only has six attributes, they are rated from 1 to 100, and it's a roll under system (with a twist, see below). You start out quite competent in at least two of your "Angles" (attributes).
You also have Areas of Knowledge that can be deployed when you do something that fits into one of those areas to give you advantage on your rolls.
When you roll your percentile dice you pick one for Effect (hat tip to Blades in the Dark) and one for Fallout, with 1-4 / 5-7 / 8-10 on each die the relevant breakpoints. However for Effect you want a high number (more effect = good) but for Fallout you want a low number (more fallout / blowback = bad). We tried to brainstorm an antonym of Fallout so that both numbers could "want" to roll high but couldn't come up with anything at the time.
Now the really cool part of this system is the 10-by-10 grid that you fill in each time you roll a check. As the grid gets filled out things become woven into the conspiracy.
For example if I make an Analysis check and roll a 43 (a success against my score of 65) then I fill in the 4 Effect, 3 Fallout cell with Polonium. Later, let's say someone rolls 34 and decides to again use the 4 for Effect and 3 for Fallout, then Polonium becomes a more prominent, important, complex, etc. part of the story. There were also some rules for ways to erase cells which could be good to get rid of something you no longer want to deal with.
Our burned spies started out in Stash Mocowitz's Newark, NJ, bagel shop, "Shmeer Tactics", where Stash's idiot nephew Tomas had run afoul of what turned out to be a complex drug running operation.
Jim's character Masha Ivanovich the socialite / art-thief / assassin (three of the "backgrounds" that combine to give you some hooks and some Angle bonuses) did a lot of undercover work; Nick's character Logan Palmer the journalist gathered info from Andropov the drunk Russian diplomat and off-the-record source; and my character James Larsen the Seawolf academic / logistics / former executive managed to get one of my contacts killed by a car bomb when we had an unencrypted phone conversation.
The story was appropriately post-September-11-burned-spies in tone and the nascent system felt good. One to put on your radar!
P.S. The repeated talk of bagels forced me to go to the bagel place at the North Market for lunch.
Players: 4 total (me, my friend Jeff, Mads, and Mike)
[only Js and Ms allowed at this table]
This is a hack of Rebels of the Outlaw Wastes but instead of a retro dystopia, this is the 18th century "somewhere in Europe" like in the Graustark novels, the book/film Prisoner of Zenda, or Lloyd Alexander's other series that isn't The Black Cauldron (i.e, the Westmark books).
This game has a spectacular Appendix N!
The system is Powered by the Apocalypse / Blades in the Dark more or less except you roll different sided dice (not just d6) and most excitingly you get to put a STICKER on your character sheet when you level up a move.
We spent the first part of the game generating our world, country, and situation (as you do) before we created characters.
Each character has a military role because this is unabashedly a game that cares about its wargaming roots. You have a movement speed, a range, formations, all depending upon your character's Commission. For example, my character was in command of a unit of light infantry with a move (March) of 1, range of 1, and 3 formations… pretty average all around-ers. Whereas Mads' character was in command of the gunners (read: cannons) with a range of 2 and only two formations (limbered or unlimbered guns).
I am a sucker for games that combine RPG with boardgame (or wargame) approaches so I very much enjoyed Rebels. It reminds me a little bit of Wrath of the Autarch, not literally, but conceptually, because both are games explicitly about military conflict in which you also control an RPG character.
Random quote about Mike's character, Helmut von Topp: "He is a one note character, but it's a REALLY LOUD note."
Players: 2 total
Star Folk is "a Golden Age pulp sci-fi RPG based on the Odd Folk system."
Your character has a Name, a number of hits, and some stuff that you do represented by cards with 4 choices on them.
You roll a d4 and do that many things; generally one of them is "you succeed" and the other 3 are various complications. But you don't have to choose to succeed, because sometimes the complications are really fun.
As Marc put it, the game is a chaos engine.
Unfortunately in this game the other player was a bit tentative and didn't fully buy into the gonzo Flash Gordon situations we found ourselves in. But it was still fun to "and then…" a bunch as our characters found themselves in repeated scrapes.
Random quote from this game that I wrote down: "Oceana, the dumbest possible name for a volcanic planet."
Players: 6 total (me, my friend Jeff, his friend Mike, 3 more whose names I didn't get)
ShadowWest is a hack of ShadowDark which is the latest in the OSR movement / shtick / thing / whatever you want to call it.
I am not an OSR guy but wanted to experience the torch timer which as far as I can tell is the only thing ShadowDark does differently from any other D&D-alike.
That part of the game was kind of interesting but it never really affected us because we had a ton of extra torches and lanterns. So it was a missed opportunity for the GM to bring the pain, I thought.
Overall the GM let us wander around aimlessly too much searching for the adventure, including in the final dungeon, which didn't make a very good impression on my friend's friend Mike who had never played a RPG before. (Though he plays a lot of RPG-like boardgames such as Gloomhaven, so the concept wasn't unfamiliar to him.)
We did have a good time in the Weird West roleplaying and got to beat up some creepy troglodytes so that was fine. But overall the game system was meh and the GM needed to tighten up the reins (heyo!) to keep the game moving.
Players: 5 total (me, Pete, Nick, Steve, Kate)
Most people reading this have probably heard of Swords Without Master and for those who haven't, I'm not going to butcher an explanation of it so follow that link
I took six pages of notes on this game (not an exaggeration) but now I ask myself, does anyone other than me and the players at the table care about the detailed travails of our characters? Probably not!
As a method to impose narrative beats and story structure upon make-believe play, Swords Without Master worked really well. However, the part of me that grew up on Red Box D&D and then AD&D wonders if Swords is really a game. I will leave that debate for some other time because the answer to the question, "Did you have fun?" -- is a resounding yes!
I think you can still late-back the Kickstarter for Swords if you'd like.
Players: 6 total (me, Virgil, Jess, 3 more whose names I didn't get)
Another game that has existed for a long time and is now being upgraded to some awesome illustrated cards.
It is a story game about several rusalka, the spirits of women who drowned in a mystic pond, who are approached by various supplicants and respond to them with monkey's-paw style wish granting.
I was so engrossed in this game that I did not take any notes. I do recall that my rusalka was initially believed to have committed suicide until it was revealed she was drowned by the village priest (!), one of several children lost by another rusalka played by Virgil. [What can we say? He's a bad mother. Just teasing, Virgil, if you read this.]
I also recall that in the final scene my rusalka grew angry with the character on my left and vowed never to speak to her again for the rest of eternity. Yikes!
Huge shout out to that player to my left who played the rusalka of Reflection as well as Jess who played the rusalka of Tides.
And in the words of another player, "This is a fun party game for weird people!"
Was it fun? Heck yes.
I played six games with the creator of those games. That's really cool!
My reflection is this: in some ways Games on Demand is a victim of its own success, or at least a victim of the success of the indie storygames movement in general.
I took the spreadsheet of 2026 Origins ticketed game sessions and counted 586 that I consider either definitely indie storygames (like Dread, Good Society, Powered by the Apocalypse, Ten Candles) or sort of indie storygames (like Cortex Plus, the Cosmere RPG, Modiphius 2d20 games).
That's 586 events that arguably could have taken place in the Games on Demand room in a past universe.
The denominator here is 7,581 listed events so by my completely flawless and unbiased assignment of games to "definitely indie storygame" or "sort of indie storygame" categories that means…
7.7% (586 / 7581) of ALL events at Origins (including RPGS, board games, TCGs, whatever those guys with model trains are doing…) were indie-adjacent
… and that's not even counting Games on Demand events which would tick the percentage closer to 8%.
Indie storygames are no longer a weird niche that only the coolest nerds play confined to our one little corner of the convention. Indie storygames have spread to the masses. Thus, part of the reason for lower attendance at Games on Demand is because some of the, umm, demand for such games is being fulfilled by regular Origins events. That's fantastic for "average" players who have no idea about Games on Demand but have a 7.7% chance to play an indie storygame even if they throw a dart at the events listing.
As always, thanks to everyone who ran a game, played a game, and of course extra thanks to our tireless Games on Demand organizers for keeping the fires burning.
See you next year!
(Origins being the Midwest U.S.A. game convention that is not GenCon. Origins takes place in Columbus, Ohio, in mid June.)
Hello. My name is Joshua Randall and you might remember me from such past "What I Did At Origins" reports as the one from 2016 and holy crap, that was a decade ago.
Most of these games were played via Games on Demand as is my wont.
7th Sea [not a Games on Demand]
GM: Justin T.Players: 6 total
For as long as I can remember attending Origins there has been a 7th Sea cadre. And I've always been intrigued by the setting, which is Three Musketeers & pirates with magic. But I never pulled the trigger (haHA!) until this year.
The system has you state what you want to do, then the GM chooses the relevant Trait ("ability score") plus Skill and that determines how many d10s you roll. You then make groups of dice that add up to at least 10 and each group is one success.
You can get bonus dice in various ways, too.
Then your number of successes are used for various things including margin of success, dealing damage, and some other stuff. You can download the 7th Sea quickstart if you want details.
The world is Theah which is "not-Earth", or yes-literally- E A R T H anagrammed with an extra H and no R. Theah has recognizable analogues of Earth countries and cultures. I gather there is a complex and detailed meta-plot.
In the scenario our characters were "honorable pirates" who were sent to stop the Montaignes (the not-French) from taking control of a particular part of the Ataban Sea (the not-Caribbean). The opening was a cool setup in which our ship was in a fast-moving channel between two islands, but the Montaigne had stretched a chain across the water so if we didn't do something about it within a few "rounds" the ship would be destroyed.
One of the characters was able to aim the cannons carefully to destroy the apparatus holding the chain, but then we all leapt off the ship to fight Montaige on shore, and the ship sailed away without us and became Ship No Longer Appearing In This Adventure. Which was weird and disappointing particularly to my character who had a few ship-specific talents.
After that exciting opening the game turned into a lengthy investigation around a religious prophecy and a secret society in hiding and some miracles from the past that had present-day analogues and to be honest I had trouble following it all because it related to the meta-plot and also it was about 80 degrees in the room.
We spent so long on this investigation that we had to compress the final throwdown with the Montaigne, in which everyone unloaded every possible resource they'd been holding back (as you do in one-shots) and we were victorious. Huzzah!
The game system seemed fine for a trad game [insert Games on Demand monocle-wearing emoji here] though I'd want to play it more to see if I shouldn't just replace it with Fate when I want to get my musketeers & pirate on.
Random quote from this game that I wrote down and now don't remember what it means: "Abstract villainy - the worst kind!"
Eyes Only
(not to be confused with the Delta Green supplement)GM: Marc Majcher (the game's creator)
Players: 3 total (me, Jim, Nick)
In Marc's words, he is creating Eyes Only because his friends wanted to play Top Secret (the old TSR spy game) and Top Secret is not a good game.
Jim (one of the other players) and I had a good laugh because we both remembered an example from Top Secret in which the character needs to bluff his way past a chef and this bluff depends upon whether you should tear lettuce or cut it to make a salad. Because nothing screams exciting spy adventures more than lettuce!
In keeping with its Top Secret inspiration, your character in Eyes Only has six attributes, they are rated from 1 to 100, and it's a roll under system (with a twist, see below). You start out quite competent in at least two of your "Angles" (attributes).
You also have Areas of Knowledge that can be deployed when you do something that fits into one of those areas to give you advantage on your rolls.
When you roll your percentile dice you pick one for Effect (hat tip to Blades in the Dark) and one for Fallout, with 1-4 / 5-7 / 8-10 on each die the relevant breakpoints. However for Effect you want a high number (more effect = good) but for Fallout you want a low number (more fallout / blowback = bad). We tried to brainstorm an antonym of Fallout so that both numbers could "want" to roll high but couldn't come up with anything at the time.
Now the really cool part of this system is the 10-by-10 grid that you fill in each time you roll a check. As the grid gets filled out things become woven into the conspiracy.
For example if I make an Analysis check and roll a 43 (a success against my score of 65) then I fill in the 4 Effect, 3 Fallout cell with Polonium. Later, let's say someone rolls 34 and decides to again use the 4 for Effect and 3 for Fallout, then Polonium becomes a more prominent, important, complex, etc. part of the story. There were also some rules for ways to erase cells which could be good to get rid of something you no longer want to deal with.
Our burned spies started out in Stash Mocowitz's Newark, NJ, bagel shop, "Shmeer Tactics", where Stash's idiot nephew Tomas had run afoul of what turned out to be a complex drug running operation.
Jim's character Masha Ivanovich the socialite / art-thief / assassin (three of the "backgrounds" that combine to give you some hooks and some Angle bonuses) did a lot of undercover work; Nick's character Logan Palmer the journalist gathered info from Andropov the drunk Russian diplomat and off-the-record source; and my character James Larsen the Seawolf academic / logistics / former executive managed to get one of my contacts killed by a car bomb when we had an unencrypted phone conversation.
The story was appropriately post-September-11-burned-spies in tone and the nascent system felt good. One to put on your radar!
P.S. The repeated talk of bagels forced me to go to the bagel place at the North Market for lunch.
Rebels of the Crownless March
GM: Michael (the game's creator)Players: 4 total (me, my friend Jeff, Mads, and Mike)
[only Js and Ms allowed at this table]
This is a hack of Rebels of the Outlaw Wastes but instead of a retro dystopia, this is the 18th century "somewhere in Europe" like in the Graustark novels, the book/film Prisoner of Zenda, or Lloyd Alexander's other series that isn't The Black Cauldron (i.e, the Westmark books).
This game has a spectacular Appendix N!
The system is Powered by the Apocalypse / Blades in the Dark more or less except you roll different sided dice (not just d6) and most excitingly you get to put a STICKER on your character sheet when you level up a move.
We spent the first part of the game generating our world, country, and situation (as you do) before we created characters.
Each character has a military role because this is unabashedly a game that cares about its wargaming roots. You have a movement speed, a range, formations, all depending upon your character's Commission. For example, my character was in command of a unit of light infantry with a move (March) of 1, range of 1, and 3 formations… pretty average all around-ers. Whereas Mads' character was in command of the gunners (read: cannons) with a range of 2 and only two formations (limbered or unlimbered guns).
I am a sucker for games that combine RPG with boardgame (or wargame) approaches so I very much enjoyed Rebels. It reminds me a little bit of Wrath of the Autarch, not literally, but conceptually, because both are games explicitly about military conflict in which you also control an RPG character.
Random quote about Mike's character, Helmut von Topp: "He is a one note character, but it's a REALLY LOUD note."
Star Folk
GM: Marc Majcher (the game's creator)Players: 2 total
Star Folk is "a Golden Age pulp sci-fi RPG based on the Odd Folk system."
Your character has a Name, a number of hits, and some stuff that you do represented by cards with 4 choices on them.
You roll a d4 and do that many things; generally one of them is "you succeed" and the other 3 are various complications. But you don't have to choose to succeed, because sometimes the complications are really fun.
As Marc put it, the game is a chaos engine.
Unfortunately in this game the other player was a bit tentative and didn't fully buy into the gonzo Flash Gordon situations we found ourselves in. But it was still fun to "and then…" a bunch as our characters found themselves in repeated scrapes.
Random quote from this game that I wrote down: "Oceana, the dumbest possible name for a volcanic planet."
ShadowWest [not a Games on Demand]
GM: John Harford (the game's creator)Players: 6 total (me, my friend Jeff, his friend Mike, 3 more whose names I didn't get)
ShadowWest is a hack of ShadowDark which is the latest in the OSR movement / shtick / thing / whatever you want to call it.
I am not an OSR guy but wanted to experience the torch timer which as far as I can tell is the only thing ShadowDark does differently from any other D&D-alike.
That part of the game was kind of interesting but it never really affected us because we had a ton of extra torches and lanterns. So it was a missed opportunity for the GM to bring the pain, I thought.
Overall the GM let us wander around aimlessly too much searching for the adventure, including in the final dungeon, which didn't make a very good impression on my friend's friend Mike who had never played a RPG before. (Though he plays a lot of RPG-like boardgames such as Gloomhaven, so the concept wasn't unfamiliar to him.)
We did have a good time in the Weird West roleplaying and got to beat up some creepy troglodytes so that was fine. But overall the game system was meh and the GM needed to tighten up the reins (heyo!) to keep the game moving.
Swords Without Master
GM: Epi Ravachol (the game's creator)Players: 5 total (me, Pete, Nick, Steve, Kate)
Most people reading this have probably heard of Swords Without Master and for those who haven't, I'm not going to butcher an explanation of it so follow that link
I took six pages of notes on this game (not an exaggeration) but now I ask myself, does anyone other than me and the players at the table care about the detailed travails of our characters? Probably not!
As a method to impose narrative beats and story structure upon make-believe play, Swords Without Master worked really well. However, the part of me that grew up on Red Box D&D and then AD&D wonders if Swords is really a game. I will leave that debate for some other time because the answer to the question, "Did you have fun?" -- is a resounding yes!
I think you can still late-back the Kickstarter for Swords if you'd like.
Rusalka
GM: Nick Wedig (the game's creator)Players: 6 total (me, Virgil, Jess, 3 more whose names I didn't get)
Another game that has existed for a long time and is now being upgraded to some awesome illustrated cards.
It is a story game about several rusalka, the spirits of women who drowned in a mystic pond, who are approached by various supplicants and respond to them with monkey's-paw style wish granting.
I was so engrossed in this game that I did not take any notes. I do recall that my rusalka was initially believed to have committed suicide until it was revealed she was drowned by the village priest (!), one of several children lost by another rusalka played by Virgil. [What can we say? He's a bad mother. Just teasing, Virgil, if you read this.]
I also recall that in the final scene my rusalka grew angry with the character on my left and vowed never to speak to her again for the rest of eternity. Yikes!
Huge shout out to that player to my left who played the rusalka of Reflection as well as Jess who played the rusalka of Tides.
And in the words of another player, "This is a fun party game for weird people!"
The End & Reflection
Was Origins and Games on Demand the same as it was ten years ago? No. How could it be? Freakin' COVID. Freakin' Earth-orbiting-the-Sun. Time passes and you can't go home again.Was it fun? Heck yes.
I played six games with the creator of those games. That's really cool!
My reflection is this: in some ways Games on Demand is a victim of its own success, or at least a victim of the success of the indie storygames movement in general.
I took the spreadsheet of 2026 Origins ticketed game sessions and counted 586 that I consider either definitely indie storygames (like Dread, Good Society, Powered by the Apocalypse, Ten Candles) or sort of indie storygames (like Cortex Plus, the Cosmere RPG, Modiphius 2d20 games).
That's 586 events that arguably could have taken place in the Games on Demand room in a past universe.
The denominator here is 7,581 listed events so by my completely flawless and unbiased assignment of games to "definitely indie storygame" or "sort of indie storygame" categories that means…
7.7% (586 / 7581) of ALL events at Origins (including RPGS, board games, TCGs, whatever those guys with model trains are doing…) were indie-adjacent
… and that's not even counting Games on Demand events which would tick the percentage closer to 8%.
Indie storygames are no longer a weird niche that only the coolest nerds play confined to our one little corner of the convention. Indie storygames have spread to the masses. Thus, part of the reason for lower attendance at Games on Demand is because some of the, umm, demand for such games is being fulfilled by regular Origins events. That's fantastic for "average" players who have no idea about Games on Demand but have a 7.7% chance to play an indie storygame even if they throw a dart at the events listing.
As always, thanks to everyone who ran a game, played a game, and of course extra thanks to our tireless Games on Demand organizers for keeping the fires burning.
See you next year!
