Motivation: Your Impetus to Adventure

RISE introduces “motivation,” or the curation of a handful of adjectives that describe your character’s priorities, goals, and morals. These adjectives appear at the top of your character sheet, above your character portrait. Motivation is designed to take the typical “alignment” (lawful neutral, chaotic evil, etc.) and provide more opportunity for individuation. The parameters set by your choice of adjectives help you to determine how your character might behave in a particular situation. These adjectives help to define your character, and may often aide in determining what his or her objective should be.

Motivations are roughly grouped by alignment: for example, “just,” “devoted,” and “draconian” fall under Order, and “heedless,” “iconoclastic,” and “anarchic” belong to Chaos. RISE supplies a list of adjectives that can be adopted, or can be a starting point for you to choose your own adjectives. Ideally, 3-5 adjectives should provide a good sketch of your character without becoming overly prescriptive. As is the case with real people, your character may not respond in line with his or her ideal or self-proclaimed values every time, but the adjectives provide a plumb line through which to filter your command of the character, mapping onto and enhancing the other plumb lines offered by your earlier choices of Focus, Ancestry, Class, and Theme —what we call the FACT system. Your FACTS precede, and help to determine, your alignment. FACTs provide the type of character, and Motivation adds specificity beyond the basic FACTs.

Consider a character, Eloisham, with a focus of confrontation, of the ancestry men, belonging to the conquerer class, with a martial primal Barbarian theme. This feels rather specific, but FACTs alone do not determine a character, which is why alignment is needed. The difference between choosing an alignment of chaotic good or lawful evil should be clear enough. Here is where adjectives come into play and allow you to transcend stereotypes and create a rounded character. A player may choose to bestow upon Eloisham the alignment of lawful-neutral and the adjectives “calculating” and “formal” from the Order category and “resolute” and “loyal” from Neutral. This character’s behavior would likely differ significantly from Gemma’s, who shares the same FACTs but whose player has chosen “scrupulous” and “utilitarian” to represent her sense of Order and “instinctual” and “simple” as Neutral characteristics. A third player may choose to endow his character with four adjectives from Neutral and one from Order— the permutations permit a phenomenal spectrum of characters to exist with the same basic FACTs but very different conceptions of how those FACTs are put into play.

You may feel that some adjectives apply to multiple points on the alignment spectrum, and that it’s even possible, and perhaps desirable, to introduce the potential for inner conflict by assigning your character adjective combinations like “detached” and “conformist”. Even if you choose a very predictable “obsessive, seditious” evil character, the addition of the adjective “petty” in lieu of “murderous” definitely provides extra flavor, as well as a glimpse into your character’s mind. The goal, of course, is to map out your creation onto paper so that, having really explored and come to know your character’s character, you are better equipped to RISE when adventure presents itself.