Casting Shadows

This is the 18th day of #RPGaDay2026. This week, the prompts will be posts inspired by Triple Ace Games’ blend of heroic adventure with horror in Paul ‘Wiggy’ Wade-Williams’ swashbuckling RPG, All for One: Regime Diabolique. Of course, the very savvy among you, adept with calendars and the passage of time, will be realizing that today is Tuesday and that that might mean there could be a picture of one of the seven dogs who live here and give meaning to life. If so, you’d be right. Grace is back because no one is as full of grace as a Grace, and our Grace has the grace to grace this meagre page again.

Life is full of pleasures large and small, expected and unexpected, fleeting and lingering, deserved and undeserved. One of my precious gifts in life is the look in Grace’s eyes when she is absorbed in a task and makes herself an extension of my will and makes my will an extension of her drives. As arthritis slowly takes away her ability to accomplish the tasks she loves the most that look is shifting more to a permanent home in my memory than in my daily reality, but there are times when we throw the past, the pain, and the foolishly gibbering world to the four winds and just bolt, like lightning from the hammer of Thor. We’ll accept the consequences later for one more moment of perfect Grace.

Such directness about feelings can make some people uncomfortable. It is that sort of thing which makes the world a paler and less-significant place where the undeserving ride waves of indifference across reefs of inadequacy to positions of power.

That directness is the spine of a character like today’s archetype: the Duelist. Framed tightly in the martial archetype of the Swordsman and given life through the motivation of Revenge, the Duelist is born to be as direct and directed as the blade around which his personality takes its shape.

Already deadly at this young age and early stage of development, if he survives the piste his outlook pits him against life upon, he will leave fear in his wake as the faint of heart fawn at his approach. He might not survive. Few do on the path he walks.

The interesting thing is, he does not mind.

Having a purpose, understanding what it is, and being able to fulfill it, is as close to heaven as some people might wish to ask. That the steps which put him on this path begin in tragedy cannot be denied. That the steps taken upon it are an agony of waiting. The victories between the first step and the final step, where revenge is attained, are as nothing in the plunge toward the final goal. They are events in the lives of others, immaterial and irrelevant. Only revenge matters. Attained, or lost in the attempt, matters not. Live by the sword, live as the sword, die – as all men do – but without regret… and maybe… just maybe… with contentment.

The third full week of seven days in #RPGaDAY2026 thrusts on. Our next stop is the prompt ‘Desire.’ Do you know the desire of your heart? Do you run from it or toward it?

See you then!