Motivations
Motivations Basics
Motivations are the things that drive your character forward. Her life goals, impulses, and desires all qualify as motivations. Anytime you successfully complete a task related to one of your Motivations, you earn XP that may be spent improving your character. This XP is added to both your XP Bank and your Earned XP. When you spend your XP improving your character, you subtract it from your XP Bank. Your Earned XP is a permanent record of your character's advancement, and comes into play when dealing with XP inheritance in generational stories.
XP may come at any point in a mission, not just the end. If a small task related to a Motivation is completed in the middle of a mission, XP is received immediately. Players should not expect the GM to know every player character’s Motivation list by heart; if you believe you should be awarded XP based on one of your Motivations for a particular action, ask your GM if you may add it.
Some Motivations will give a character XP frequently, but in small amounts; others tend to only have major goals. For example, the Manipulator motivation will probably never have any "Arc" goals fulfilled, but is likely have multiple "Scene" goals every single mission or adventure.
Every fulfilled goal gains you XP if you have the appropriate Motivation. Goals come in three main sizes: Scene, Session, and Arc. If the GM believes that a particular accomplishment is worth something in between the goal levels, he is free to reward an intermediate amount of XP; more commonly, he will just award the standard amounts.
Scene goals: Fleeting moments of success; the sorts of successes you might attain anywhere between 1 and 5 times in a given game session. The base XP reward for a Scene goal is 1 XP.
Session goals: The sort of task you might accomplish after working for most of a game session, or if the objective involved a series of smaller jobs across several game sessions. The base XP reward for a Session goal is 5 XP.
Arc goals: Adventure-long, serious life-altering missions. These goals will take a lot of effort across multiple game sessions, and if using time skips, possibly across many years. If Motivations are shared by a character’s descendants, it is easy to imagine a scenario where they even span generations. Should a goal of such a grand scale be accomplished, the GM may feel free to improvise a higher level of XP reward even above Arc Goals. The base XP reward for an Arc goal is 20 XP.
Although many of the listed Motivations are the same as team roles or jobs, one does not need to take that Motivation to perform the job; she simply doesn’t gain XP for doing that job well.
When a goal is fulfilled, the Base XP for that scale of goal is multiplied by the number of levels the character has in that Motivation. For example, if a Level 3 Environmentalist saves a community of animals from hunters (a Session goal), then she will gain (3 × 5 = ) 15 XP.
Interests
Interests may sometimes be thought of as specializations of Motivations which also bestow some knowledge to the character. Interests can be rolled as a knowledge check by adding their value to INT as if they were a skill; the GM determines the threshold (based on the obscurity of the information desired), and if the player succeeds in the test, the character is aware of that information and gains XP in the amount of the level of that Interest. Unlike Motivations, any given interest may only earn XP once per session, and cannot be multiplied for session or arc goals.
Hint: Tracking XP with tokens
Like many numbers in Afterverse, one's XP Bank may change several times over the course of a game session. To save erasing and rewriting, you may choose to use tokens to represent the XP Rewards as your character accumulates them over the course of a game session. The boxes on the sheet labeled for each kind of XP Reward may be used to place the tokens relevant to each. When the session is over (or when the player wishes to spend his XP), these rewards are then totaled and marked on the sheet.
Cultural Motivations
Most cultures have an expectation of behaviors. In most cases, this involves protecting your family, looking out for your friends, seeking romance, and so on; people who do not seek these things are often thought of as either immoral or at least deviant. These are known as Universal Motivations. Any character from such a culture must take these motivations (unless she takes the “Counterculture” quality or one of the other related qualities), and they count towards your total number of Motivations. If a cultural motivation has a Base Cost, ignore that Base Cost unless you choose to take additional level of the motivation above what that culture requires.
Generally, if a member of a culture is dealing with someone that he knows does not share these motivations, he will judge the other person negatively, putting her at a -2 dice pool modifier for all social tests. (This only applies if he knows about it; unless she makes it overt, make a Knowledge Base check to see if he knows that she is from a culture that does not share the same motivations, or a Judge Intentions check; either one with a threshold of 3, with modifiers as determined by the GM based on the familiarity with the other culture). This modifier is multiplied if his culture has the Universal Motivation in question at a higher level.
Changing motivations
Throughout a character's life, they may not always be motivated by the same things. Things happen in life, viewpoints change, and lessons are learned. Motivation levels may be shifted when such a major event happens that changes a character - one level may be shifted from one motivation to another for each event. In time skips, motivations may be shifted freely.
Motivations List
Achievement (base cost: 3)
Achievement describes the act of accomplishing whatever you have set out to accomplish. This motivation will earn XP frequently, and is recommended for players that may not have a clear idea of their character's quirks.
Artist
An artist of any medium - be it written word, visual, performing, or musical - seeks to create new and innovative expressions, to put them to canvas (or paper, digital recording, or hard drive), and to have an audience appreciate it. Artists may use their experiences as inspiration, and receive XP for it.
Company Man/Made Man (base cost: 2)
Though the organization (organized crime or a corporation) may vary, these Motivations involve following the cause of the organization, obeying the rules laid down, and following the hierarchy. They’re also concerned with moving up personally in the organization.
Compliance
This character has little will of her own; she is being forced to serve someone else. This motivation is mutually exclusive with the Achievement motivation; her will is not her own, thus setting her own goals and being self-actualized is not within her abilities. (Compliance does not necessarily mean only following orders; if the character takes initiative to help her master, she may still gain XP for it.)
Environmentalist
Above all, the Environmentalist sees it as her duty to save the planet, or the universe if she’s feeling grandiose. She abhors deforestation, strip-mining, pollution, and colonization of worlds that may harbor native life; anything to reduce the power of those who would hurt the planet is what she seeks. In a more general sense, she generally seeks to preserve life and the diversity of life.
Freedom Fighter
This motivation, common among oppressed people and their sympathizers, rewards characters for disrupting a cruel authority and replacing it with a fairer one. There’s a fine line between this motivation and Anarchist, and they often work together.
Family/Friends (base cost: 2)
Most of us would go the extra mile for a friend or a family member, and characters receive XP for doing so. Helping a friend in need, rescuing a loved one, or settling disputes between friends all contribute XP with this motivation. Notably, this motivation is only in play when the character has no selfish motives to be served by helping the friend.
Manipulator
Some people just get a kick out of getting people to do what they want them to do. This may be in manipulating them to work together, to drive teams apart, to solve a problem peacefully or violently - the important thing is that the character changed someone's mind, bent them to his own will.
Missionary
This character has a particular belief (sometimes religious, sometimes cultural or political) and believes everyone else ought to have it, too. Like with Romance, if the character that is being converted has only pretended to be converted for their own ends, the missionary may lose the XP that had been gained.
Pacifist
This character seeks peaceful resolutions to conflict. Anytime this character sees and averts a violent confrontation, this motivation may be triggered. This motivation cannot be triggered if the violence was simply delayed, or if violence happened but this character is not responsible for it; you don't get credit for simply not having fired a shot.
Promotion
A character with the Promotion motivation is an active troop in a hierarchical, usually militaristic, organization. A character with the Promotion motivation earns XP from following his superior’s orders and from protecting his unit (whatever he perceives his “unit” to be). This Motivation may only be taken by characters that have also taken the Officer quality. A list of military organizations appropriate for this motivation/quality is available in the Reference section of this book.
The XP gained from the Promotion motivation should be tracked separately from other XP in the XP Bank. When the character is up for promotion to a higher rank, only XP earned from this Motivation may be used to buy the upgrade to the Officer quality; XP from this Motivation may be used for any purpose, if the character would prefer to forego promotion at that time.
Romance (base cost: 2)
This Motivation is triggered by any romantic encounter your character has. Players are encouraged at character creation to decide not only what interests their character (gender, “type”, etc), but also what kind of relationship the character primarily seeks, be it one-night stands, long-term relationships, or anything in between. Deeper relationships take more time to build, but reward more XP.
Romantic attraction can be a double-edged sword; though it satisfies the soul, it can also be used against you. If a relationship “rug” is pulled out from under you, it can cause you to not gain any XP from the relationship, or even to lose the XP you gained from it. (As an overly clichéd example, if a character is deceived into a one night stand under the guise of a relationship, her gained XP might be taken away when the seducer leaves in the morning.)
Romance has options within it - heterosexual, homosexual, and pansexual are the most common, though other orientations can be found. The orientation should be chosen along with the Motivation. Being attracted to members of another species is rare; casual sexual relationships between different species will not satisfy this motivation. Long-term emotionally-based relationships between species satisfy this motivation at one level lower than they otherwise would. The Xenophilia quality negates both of these penalties if it applies.
Wanderer
The traveler is never content to stay in one place. Every location new to the character earns XP; the more exotic and novel the location, the higher the XP that may be gained.