Casting Shadows

Today is the thirty-first and final day of #RPGaDAY2025 and our efforts to reach this final prompt of reward offer two rewards. The first is the satisfaction of completion. The second is the chance to lay down the tools of creation to take a breath. This month-long task is done until August returns in the year to come.

To all of you who started, to those who faded in and out, to those who produced responses in one or a few batches, to those who posted daily, to those who finished, and to those who took the time to read, comment on, and share the posts of others…

Day 31: Reward

Parts of this campaign pitch – for the characters – have been quite bleak. In that sense, it is likely that for some or maybe many of the characters, the group could choose to play the campaign in such a fashion and with one of the harder modes you can run Ubiquity in that they are unlikely to make it through to the end. Even for those characters who fall, however, this does not mean that they struggled without reward.

It’s a shift of perspective for some, perhaps, but participation and contribution to something larger than one person can accomplish on their own is as rewarding as doing something alone. In both cases, if sincerely participating, you contribute all you can. How is this different than the task you complete on your own? While the first thought might be that the loner did not need help, it is met in rebuttal by understanding that the larger task could not have been completed without you.

In gaming, we might want to point to the completed campaign with a clear beginning, rising action, setbacks, the climb toward a climax, more setbacks, and a final clear victory, with a possible denouement as being first among the more rewarding play experiences. This might be especially true when this story has been explored via a single character. I certainly will not argue that that is wrong or that the attachment we can form to a character we play in long-form and open-ended play is not strong and rewarding.

What I would argue, however, is that there are comparable rewards on more levels when we take a journey between different characters in the world, when we see that world through their eyes each and every time and think of their experience as continuous, personal, and fragile.

When we look back over the chaos and clarity of play and discover found stories amid the memories, see the marks a character left on the world here, a torch passed there, a broken dream a little further on, and a hard won victory or bitter defeat beyond that, there is a rich tapestry of connection, experience, and yes – reward to remember. In sharing those memories, in casting and recasting the moments as moments of experience, of fears, of boasts, of chases and escapes, we find an echo in our own lives of how we relate our experiences to each other – not as lessons to be learned and stories to be told, but as shared experiences from which further experiences can be drawn.

Isn’t this a worthy reward?

I see it as a gift, and one that spawns new gifts in ways that resonate strongly with me and hopefully those with whom I am fortunate to game.

Anyway…

See you next year for the first day of RPGaDAY2025?

Quick Summary of Days 25-31