#RPGaDAY2026 and some Brief Updates

The announcement post for RPG a Day went up in my Casting Shadows blog and event founder David Chapman's Autocratic blog at the start of July.

As usual, the event runs the full 31 days of August and is intended to provide some inspiration and, let's say, connective tissue to a global and multilingual effort by gamers to share positive thoughts and ideas about the role-playing game hobby, the games we play, and the way we play them.

There is a lot of negativity which spreads and festers throughout the year, especially these days, as our very understanding of society, how it functions, and the tools we use to navigate it are being redefined and made the stuff of nightmare or at least regular annoyance.

RPG a Day is intended to be a brief oasis of positivity from the things which get us down and to remind ourselves and those around us of all the good things gaming provides.

This year, there are single-word prompts to use as inspiration as well as a full set of specific and directed questions if you prefer.

In addition, each week of the event has an optional modifier filter that can be used to influence your responses if you like and an optional daily modifier that can be used instead or as well if you like.

And if the idea of approaching the prompts freeform in the spirit of total improvisation is not in the cards for you this year, attention has been paid to making everything suitable for being about characters and being about character creation.

We do themes for the event most years, and while we've touched on many themes around the actual play of games, things like campaign design and the groups we play with, we have not yet had any sort of real focus on characters.

So now is that time if you like.

My personal plan is to make one character for each week of the event and use a different game for each week of the event as well.

For the other days of the week, I will look at the sort of characters and contexts which might fill the world around that character.

I think that will be fun, and I think it will be light enough of a demand on my time to be manageable through the month.

But either way, wish me luck.

You wish me luck, I'll wish you luck.

Speaking of time management, an initiative being undertaken by Mirk the Meek of his eponymous podcast called Pod by Post is being turned to a charitable purpose this month in honor of RPG a Day and of our beloved anchor which launched so many podcasts.

As has been lamented before, a lot of podcasters have wanted to participate in RPG a Day, but producing a daily podcast episode is not the same thing as a blog post or an image on Instagram or skeet on Blue Sky.

Solutions to this problem have been many, but few have been satisfying, and many people listening to this podcast will have been on the inside of that lack of satisfaction.

Teaming up with Jason of the dearly missed Nerds RPG Varietycast and perhaps some others I might be forgetting, Mirk has arranged a much more manageable team effort approach which sets aside the weeks of August for different genres of RPG and invites podcasters to leave a message on podbypost.com slash nerds slash rpg dash a dash day dash 2026 with a positive message about the genre of the week.

These voice messages will be compiled into weekly episodes meaty enough to listen to and not be disruptive of regular broadcast schedules.

The link will be available in the show notes with all the other RPG a Day links because I don't believe that you were able to scrabble fast enough to get a pen and write it down as I was reading it.

And why rewind? Anyway, thanks for doing this, Mirk and Jason.

It's a pretty awesome initiative.

If I get time, I'll try and participate myself.