Aspirations

Aspiration

You start with three Aspirations at character creation. Aspirations are goals that your character wishes to achieve, usually reflected in their backstory. They also tell the GM and your fellow players the kind of stories you'd like to see told during a campaign. 

Accomplishing an Aspiration is a major accomplishment for a character. They gain 1 extra point of experience for achieving an aspiration, and they also gain 1 Hero Point and increase their Hero Point Maximum by 1. 

Aspirations should be active goals--they should be things you need to do, not things you can avoid. For example, "don't get drunk" wouldn't be a solid aspiration, but "stay sober for a week" could be, as could "find time to attend an AA meeting." Choosing "journey to Shadow" as an aspiration could be a wonderful aspiration for a human fascinated by the bogeymen who has to figure out how to achieve this, but it isn't applicable to a horror who was spawned in the Pit and can just use Under the Bed to return to the Nightmare Realm whenever it tickles their fancy. Aspirations give your character a life and direction beyond the core story of the game, and provide fuel for side quests and plotlines that fill in the gaps between major events. 

It's okay to select aspirations your character doesn't want, but you, as a player, do want to see. For example, you can have "Fail to reconcile with your father" if you think that the failure would lead to a better story for you and your character. You get the experience for achieving that aspiration anyway.  Likewise, your character might not want to visit Hell, but if you think that would make a great story, it could definitely be an Aspiration. 

Sample Aspirations include:

• Increase my standing with the Blackcloaks or another faction

• Find out why my sister hasn't called in a few months 

• Go on a date with that cute guy in Logistics

• Visit another plane of reality

• Prove that I'm not cursed

• Meet an angel

• Uncover evidence that aliens exist

• Destroy the monster that killed my brother when we were young

• Discover what happened to my father

• Meet my childhood hero

• Recover a lost family relic that was left behind when they fled the old country

• Figure out what happened during those months I can't remember

• Find my soulmate

• Find out what was really living in the culvert near my childhood home

• Prove that my mother isn't crazy

• Put my daughter's ghost to rest

• Take over my family company

If an Aspiration no longer makes sense for a character, due to changes in the story, you can change one Aspiration at the end of a chapter. This isn't an excuse to ditch a goal that is taking too long to accomplish; rather, it's a way to keep a character's goals aligned with their behaviour and the story's direction. 

If you achieved an Aspiration over the course of a chapter, you may also add a new Aspiration at that point to reflect your character's evolving goals and priorities and reflect where you would like to see your character progress next. While you may choose not to add an aspiration if you still have one or two uncompleted aspirations, you must choose a new aspiration or retire your character at the chapter's end if you have no more aspirations. 

You may change only one aspiration and add one per chapter, and you may only have a maximum of three aspirations at a time