Casting Shadows

This is the 15th day of #RPGaDay2026 and we are in the weekend in which we segue into the second half of this event. Today our prompt is Endurance. Our weekly filter is ‘Associates,’ and our daily filter is ‘works hard for a living.’ This is the first half of the mid-point in this 31-day event. For those of you who are still managing to post every day you have our respect. Champions like the Pink Phantom are doing daily podcast releases starting with world building an old-fashioned way, and event-founder David Chapman is still posting character art daily. That’s impressive, right? RPGaDAY is not a competition though – it’s an opportunity to blend your voice with other gamers and praise our hobby. Life might not give you enough time to post every day, but we all appreciate the days when you can and do post, and are curious about what it will be. This pep-talk is brought to you by Saturday, the number 15, and the magic of roleplay. Don’t give up! We are cresting the hill and from tomorrow it’s all a downhill grade~

Hard work is hard work, and in the context of WILD that has to include a lot of interrupted sleep, hours spent waiting for missions to start, briefings and debriefings, hours spent waiting for missions to end, more briefings and debriefings, cold lunches, colder coffee, the sort of chill that seeps into your bones as fatigue turns into exhaustion, and managing the idiosyncrasies of your co-workers as they unravel under the pressure alongside you.

In the sample scenario that forms the heart of the book, the characters are asked to try to revive a child trapped in a coma. Imagine the pressure! What other tasks will ClarIT expect its interns and hires to use its dreamtech to do, and with whom? How often will people dive alone into the dreams of someone depending on them for help? How often will they be asked to dive as a team? Who will choose the members of each time and why? What effect will having that mix of personalities in the dream have on each member and on the chance of success?

Does ClarIT know enough to know what is safe and what is fool-hardy? Do the results or potential results outweigh the risks – understood or not? Sure if you work there you get to plumb the depths of dreams and do fantastic things, but… is it easy? No. That’s like comparing going skydiving with being a paratrooper.

However, there is something about hard work that starts to have an effect on a person after a while if the work is worth doing and the person is the right person to be doing it. It starts to feel good. It becomes natural and while still draining from the effort, it has a supportive and defining effect as well.

It’s not just work. It’s not just hard. There is some value to it which resonates with you and takes you another step toward being whole.

Speaking of hard work. Let’s take a little tangent because today is a special day where I live and if fits in with the prompts.

Locally, the 15th of August is Independence Day for South Korea which followed decades of outrage, protest, and defiance as the expansionist tendencies of their island neighbor and the willingness of their own greedy ruling families paved the way for the co-opting of the government and then annexation. Annexation led to a steady effort of cultural erasure and resource mining – unsurprisingly. Does history like this have anything to teach us about endurance with examples such as these of twisted ambition, self-serving greed, cruelty to others, and the defiance of the oppressed over a generation, who then had to struggle to bring the colluders to justice – and may be struggling still? Endurance cannot flag in the face of evil, tired as one might become of standing up to it. Tired as we might be now with our own struggles, there are examples we can look back on to help us keep moving forward. It’s worth it.

In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible changes in a sickening pendulum swing away from the basic realization that people are people and that is enough, toward a mealy-mouthed return to the most backward and cowardly public racism, farcical nationalism, ridiculous segregation, and grasping de-humanization of sectors of the population the ethically bankrupt desire to control. This is not the sort of thing to endure and hope it goes away, doesn’t come for you, or magically gets better. This is the sort of thing to have the endurance to resist at every turn, call out even if it’s grandma and you love her, and not just trust to a vote to make go away.

Anyway, tomorrow is Sunday, August 16th and our prompt is Composure. The weekly filter is the last day of Associates, while our daily filter will shift into Blessed.

Are you participating in RPGaDAY but via Discord or some other spot where hashtags cannot follow? How about taking a moment to share the infographic and letting your gaming friends know you have positive things to say about RPGs?