Casting Shadows

This is the 21st day of #RPGaDay2026 and today we are all Friday’s children. Can you imagine a world where that might be so – everyone ‘loving and giving’? If you are a gamer, you can. What bounds are there to your imagination and capacity to realize that imagination in play, making it feel real in the process? None, I say. Our weekly filter, the surprisingly enjoyable Instinct is still with us for a few more days. The prompt for today is tightly bound to Friday’s child, being the essence of someone ‘loving and giving’. In other words, charity. In this modern world, as Camus so rightly noted, the separation of that essence from the act gives us only performance for personal gain, and deprives both giver and recipient the real experience generosity could have effected. What sort of world does illusionary charity produce? We are living in it. Its twists and turns are brought to the forefront and exaggerated for our edification in games like All for One: Regime Diabolique where our characters are as lights in darkness which could, if able, blaze very, very brightly indeed.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Albert Camus

When I set out to play any Ubiquity game, I am generally satisfied with the standard characters the system produces unless the situation we are setting out to play requires someone who obviously requires more experience and training. The rate at which characters can be improved is satisfying for me as well. It is generally easy to develop things which are in regular use and pick up a smattering of new skills, and there are sacrifices and trade-offs to be made about what and how to improve as we play which in a game is a fun sort of strain.

What can be overlooked as it is tucked away at the end of the chargen section as a mixture of rule and implication is that it is easy to produce more established characters in the system. The difference is that they are created as usual, then updated to reflect whatever degree of additional competence the campaign might require. This can be done in two ways, a complete update with a full set of improvement points, or an incremental update with improvement done in stages to model how it might have worked out in play.

To tie this system note into the prompt of charity, the challenge is one of generosity. How many points is too much, how many are a fun and appropriate limitation? Until the group has had a chance to play and see the process and how points on the page turn into rolls on the table and averages taken, it can be a leap of faith. As a rule, I follow the guidelines given for Allies in the Resource section of the rules if making very competent characters, or just assign allotments of the final 15xp provided to finish any character in the system. A typical character gets 15xp to polish the arrangement of points on the sheet. A more experienced one gets an additional 15, and so on. If I were to make a stereotypical loner pulp character, I tend to spend the points as a lump sum. If I am making a more typical player character, I spend them in increments of 15 and consider the who, what, when, where, why, and how of those increases to help better understand and play them.

When I play, I don’t want to be fumbling around on the sheet trying to remember all the additional things they can do or to what level a Talent or Resource has been raised. I want my play of the character to be as close to instinctual as possible.

In Ubiquity, one of the more common reasons to take on a more competent character is as the GM as an NPC Patron of the group. In this role, a character in some ways uses the group to achieve their own ends, but in more ways shelters, guides, teaches, and in a real sense harnesses the group to find and fulfill their own dreams in ways they could not have done individually or on their own as a group. The ideal patron is… loving and giving. Note that does not have to include being friendly or all that interested in having you hang around their estate. There are limits!

Where the system keeps on showing its love and charity is that in the way it works and how characters are made, it is quite a natural thing to have your character grow into being a Patron of Followers who have been supporting them all along.

Patrons are a very rich part of the system and All for One has tremendous avenues for finding and navigating patronage which add incredible depth and dimension to the experience of playing it.

Tomorrow’s prompt for #RPGaDAY2026 is ‘Grit.’ We have two more days to follow Instinct as a weekly filter and the weekend arrives with two fascinating prompts for All for One.

See you then!