Casting Shadows

This is the 20th day of #RPGaDay2026 believe it or not, which leaves a meagre 11 more days to go – from a certain point of view. If we are talking about 11 days of fun and romance, that no doubt seems a little brief. If we are talking about 11 days of taunting and torture, 11 days is no doubt far outside our comfort zone. For Thursday’s child, such thoughts are normal, as they have, so the poem goes, ‘Far to Go.’ Their Instinct, I do not have to guess, is to not consider the distance, but to keep moving. Someone will be along shortly to move the goal posts. As we sail through this week, I continue to love going through All for One: Regime Diabolique for my responses. The prompt for today is helpfully ambiguous in that it might be a noun or it might be a verb – perhaps both if you are up for going twice as far.

I can approach this response either way, noun or verb, but I am going with noun and a specific version of the noun, that of living up to one’s promise. I am going to do that on this Thursday, the day given over to those who – for whatever reason – have far to go, in order to share thoughts on my longest running and (so far) most satisfying AfO character – “Martin.” You can see our round-robin GM campaign at the links below, if you are so moved. One list is just the play itself, though at times it contains notes about the rules. The other has GM and Player recaps and reflections, showing years of investment into brief and glorious runs with beloved characters always in over their heads with only each other to rely on.

Live Play: All for One – Lights in Darkness Campaign

All for One: Recaps and Reflections on Lights in Darkness

Martin began on paper initially as an object lesson into why Ubiquity characters in general, and pulp characters in particular are perhaps best served by specificity. Put your points directly and without equivocation into the thing you would most like to do when you play. To prove the truth of that truism, I scattered his points all over the place. I made him young, trying to learn too much, and always feeling like he neither knew enough nor had the time to learn it.

I then decided to take everything away from him and make him want it back – but better.

Ubiquity has a great characteristic which helps us turn away from things that do not matter to our play, but which obviously must exist. This is most easily demonstrated by money, which you can take for your character as wealth to make it a particular focal point for how they get things done, but if absent on the character sheet does not indicate destitution. It simply means that that character cannot leverage wealth or finances to solve problems. They have enough to live on and do the things their concept requires – nothing more. Rather than work with that, as I normally would, I used Martin as an example of doing the opposite. He was, to be kind, spread too thin.

He would, however, have one edge but that edge was both an enormous risk and cost him precious time – all the time.

Martin’s archetype is Noble and on his sheet this was recorded as the core of his character concept:

Of high noble birth, currently living in exile under an assumed name and in service to the King’s musketeers. He is hunted by his relatives to either return to his place among them, or to be killed and replaced by them. He plans to return to his rightful place and do his duty to France as an upstanding member of the nobility, but has a complicated need to earn renown for himself, then earn revenge on the black stain within his family line, then reclaim his birthright. “Martin” has been trained extensively in the strengths and weakness of the human form both for martial purposes and for thaumaturgical ones. He practices the arts of Homomancy and Transportation and his studies have given him a fine appreciation for God and the workings of Heaven and Earth

As the campaign played out, seeds planted in the first session took on deeper significance. Martin was on the run from the ethically-challenged magicians in his family, and the members who still retained their tradition of Theurgy were scattered across Europe. Martin was struggling to learn this God-fearing form of the family magics, forsaking the dark teachings of his closer kin, when things came to a head. Unless the musketeers could slip away from Paris and lend a hand at the risk of their lives, and possibly souls, a tremendous sin would be committed by his family as the beachhead into greater blasphemies.

Of course, to strike against the family in this way, a line tracing itself back to Charlemagne, was to incur a sentence of death.

Martin’s motivation was thus encoded on his sheet as ‘Revenge’ but as you can see from the quotation of his Background, that revenge has a complicated form and many expansive steps. Even patricide, something he committed early on in the campaign, was just a minor stepping stone across a very wide and dangerous river. To cross that river would require skills he does not have, understanding of magic he did not yet know, and friends and allies he was only just beginning to make.

So, driven by instinct to know right from wrong, convinced of his own value and promise, certain that in his veins flowed the blood of the greatest of kings, immersed deeply in powerful communion within a militant form of magical worship, and privy to the secret doors and passages the angels tread in service of the Divine as well as the keys to shape and reshape the human form, Martin struggled to learn patience in prayer and in service to the King.

His companions in that service? They made all the difference.

Tomorrow’s prompt for #RPGaDAY2026 is ‘Charity.’ We keep Instinct as a weekly filter and moving to Friday brings us a very compatible filter of “loving and giving.”

See you then!