A celebrated war hero and the son of a powerful noble house, Leo is brave, charismatic, and not particularly thoughtful - exactly the kind of person that institutions and ambitious people find useful. His arc across the Age of Madness trilogy is about the distance between the hero he believes himself to be and the uses to which that belief gets put. He is not stupid, but he is surrounded by people who are better at thinking than he is and who know it, and his unwillingness to acknowledge this is what drives him toward the series' central catastrophe.

The son of Jezal dan Luthar, Crown Prince of the Union, and a man who has inherited his father's charm and none of his ambition - which in Orso's case means a cheerful, self-deprecating dissolution rather than Jezal's vain striving. Orso knows he is not cut out for what is being asked of him and is the only person in his vicinity honest about it. His arc across the Age of Madness trilogy involves the discovery that decency, in a world moving toward revolution, is not enough and may not be the point. He is one of Abercrombie's most sympathetic creations and one of his most brutally treated.

The daughter of the Dogman, chieftain of the North, with the Long Eye - the ability to see the future in fits that leave her incapacitated and uncertain what is vision and what is fear. Rikke is the most unconventional of the Age of Madness protagonists: funny, self-aware, and navigating a world of Northern politics that has no obvious place for a woman whose father is dying and whose gift is as much a curse as an asset. Her arc involves learning to use what she has - the Long Eye, her father's name, her own judgment - in a world that prefers its leaders to be straightforward and male.

The daughter of Sand dan Glokta, now the most successful investor in the Union - a woman who has built a financial empire through intelligence, ruthlessness, and a clear understanding of how power actually works. Savine is her father's daughter in ways she both recognises and prefers not to examine. She enters the Age of Madness trilogy at the top of the social and financial hierarchy and spends three books watching that hierarchy collapse, discovering in the process what she is actually capable of. She is one of Abercrombie's most complex characters in the later work - someone whose competence is genuine and whose blind spots are equally genuine.

An Inquisitor working for Arch Lector Glokta's successor, Vick is one of the Age of Madness's POV characters and among its most compelling. A survivor of the labour camps in Angland, she operates with a bone-deep pragmatism about what survival costs - and a persistent, inconvenient conscience that keeps complicating her calculations.