Aspirations

Chronicles of Darkness characters start with three Aspirations. Aspirations are goals that your character wishes to accomplish. They’re also statements about the sort of stories you want to tell about your character.
Accomplishing an Aspiration is one of the main ways you can earn Beats to improve your character. You should aim for accomplishing about one Aspiration per session. If you are playing a one-shot, all of your Aspirations should be focused, short-term goals that you could potentially complete within that session. If you are playing in a long-running chronicle, then choosing long-term goals is okay. Ideally, you should have a mix of Aspirations, some of which can be resolved in one session, and some which will take many sessions to accomplish. If you know that your character is going to start out hitchhiking, “Find a place to stay the night” is a perfectly reasonable Aspiration. If she recently had a fight with her girlfriend, “Reconcile with Jane” is a fine Aspiration. Another important thing to consider when deciding on your Aspirations is that you want them to be active goals. They have to be something that you need to do, rather than something that you need to avoid. For example, “Don’t get drunk” wouldn’t be a very good Aspiration for a character, but “Go a day without taking a drink” could be, if your character would find this to be a struggle.
Aspirations give your character life and direction beyond the scenario dreamed up by the Storyteller. They make your character feel more real, give the Storyteller hooks to get him involved in the story, and establish what your character does if there isn’t an immediate crisis in front of him. It is also okay to select Aspirations that your character doesn’t want, but that you want to see happen to the char- acter. For example, your character almost certainly doesn’t want to be kidnapped by the man with the gray face that used to be her father, but that might be a story that you are interested in seeing. You can choose Aspirations that repre- sent you trying and failing to do something. You can have an Aspiration like “Fail to find proof of the existence of ghosts,” or “Fail to reconcile with Jane,” if you think that it will make a more interesting story. Even though the character has failed at what she wants, you as the player still get the reward for completing that Aspiration.
Aspirations are one of the best ways for the players to signal to the Storyteller what sort of stories they want to be part of. So, Storytellers, be sure to pay attention to what Aspirations your players have selected. If you were planning on a suspenseful, low-key session with little overt supernatural influence, it might be a problem if all of your players have chosen Aspirations like “destroy a supernatural threat,” or “see a monster with my own eyes.” It doesn’t mean you have to change your plans completely, but you may need to tweak the session a bit to allow for some details that fit with the Aspirations a little better. Or you can sit down and talk with the players, and make sure that you are all on the same page with regards to the story that you are trying to tell.

Changing Aspirations

When you first make your character, if you are not entirely certain what Aspirations to pick, don’t worry about it. You can try to come up with a few basic ones, such as the simple, easily-accomplished Aspirations mentioned earlier. Or go ahead and leave a few of your Aspiration slots blank for now, and define them while you play the first few sessions. Aspirations are not meant to be a straightjacket or a source of stress, but a tool to help you play the character that you want to play.
A character’s Aspirations will also likely change over the course of the chronicle. If you accomplish an Aspiration, for example, you should replace it with a new Aspiration after that session. This is a good thing to work on in between sessions. Sometimes Aspirations are no longer relevant to a charac- ter, even if they haven’t actually been achieved. For example, if your character has an Aspiration of “reconcile with my estranged father,” it’s hard to accomplish if he is murdered in the fourth session of the game (though certainly not impossible, in the Chronicles of Darkness). Or maybe you find out that your character’s father is somehow responsible for the eyeless, grinning thing that pulled your mother into that grove of trees the night she disappeared. At that point, you may not want to reconcile any more.
If an Aspiration no longer makes sense for a character, a player can change the Aspiration between chapters with the Storyteller’s approval. This isn’t an excuse to ditch a goal that is taking too long to accomplish, but rather is an option to keep a character’s goals in line with their behavior and the overall direction of the story.

Sample Short-Term Aspirations

• Find a new job.
• Find out why my sister hasn’t called me back.
• Get beat up by the school bully.
• Go on a date with the new guy at work.
• Indulge my addiction.
• Mug someone.
• Put myself in mortal danger.
• See a ghost.
• Show myself that I’m not cursed.

Sample Long-Term Aspirations

• Become a parent.
• Destroy the beast that killed my lover.
• Discover what happened when my father disappeared.
• Figure out what happened during those weeks I can’t remember.
• Find my soul mate.
• 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 the company