Motivations & Passions
"We do what we must, because we can."
It is important at times to realize that After Sundown is a role playing game, and as such that the characters being played are in fact characters and not the actual people playing the game. Even though a player will routinely use first person pronouns to describe a character's activities (for example: "I call the dog to me" or "I bend down and lick the blood off the floor") the character and the player are different people. The first person pronoun is used as a storytelling and acting device. The use of the first person pronoun helps bring immediacy and sympathy to the characters, but it doesn't actually conflate the character's unique personality traits with those of the player. Conversely, the MC will usually refer to non-player characters in the third person (for example: "The knife cuts deeply into Her" or "Max begins to cry"), and may well refer to player characters in the second person (for example: "The sputtering of the lamp plunges you into darkness"). This is done because the MC has a lot of characters they are controlling, and it is incomprehensible if all of them identify themselves as "me". But regardless of what pronouns and sentence constructions are employed, the characters are not the same as the players. They have different abilities and a different fate. The characters can even die and it won't be the end of the world for the players. Most importantly, the characters are characters in a story, and they have different motivations from those of the players.
Every character in the story, like every person in real life, has personal beliefs, fears, goals, and habits that act as strings to their marionettes. In After Sundown, these motivations are formalized into Passions, Ethics, and Ideologies. And they can be of great help when determining what a character's likely responses to a situation might be. But the vagaries of circumstances are too complicated for the game rules to cover in total, and so it falls to players to adjudicate what they think their character's actions would actually be in response to specific events. Not only is this much more immersive and entertaining than simply deterministically generating each character's actions, but it can potentially give a more nuanced, more real response than any table ever could. The fact that each player presumably passes the Turing Test means that they can play a role that also passes the Turing Test. And that's a good thing.
It is unfortunately true that the game world as a whole includes billions of people and most of the background characters will not be given even the barest of motivational sketches. When the characters walk into a 7-11 at 2 in the morning to get slurpees, it's not super important what the guy behind the counter is doing with his life, chances are that his lines in the play will be the barest of pleasantries and he'll get credited as "7-11 Employee". But this is not always the case. Events have a tendency to spiral out of control and develop quickly in a role playing game, and it is entirely possible that the players will, for whatever reason, end up conversing with the 7-11 employee for an extended period of time, bringing his name, his ideals, and his fears to actual importance. For the MC there are two main ways to handle this fact. The first is to simply write a character on the spot, filling in details as they become important. And the second is to have some "templates" - a set of mundane Extras set up in advance that can be slotted into the story whenever some random person in a bank or a crowd becomes important to the story. Random name tables are incredibly useful for this, and the MC should consider getting some.
Losing Control: Frenzy and Despondency
"Rar!"
Characters in the realm of horror are often the carriers of some pretty hefty psychological baggage. Burdened by curses and sustained by dark magic, most supernaturals have a pretty tenuous grip on their sanity and even their composure. The beast lurks rather shallowly beneath the surface, and when a supernatural creature transforms into their war form, it does not even do that.
When subject to strong stimuli, a supernatural character may completely fly off the handle and start doing crazy crap. Players are encouraged to roleplay their loss of control to the hilt. While often as not being fairly useless or even detrimental to their own life goals, the erratic and extreme actions of such a character are quite spotlight hogging. Such rampages can make or break a story, and Frenzy tests should be made sparingly.
To control Frenzy a character makes a Willpower test plus an appropriate skill. What skills can be used to add to that test vary depending upon the Passion. For example, a character subject to Fear Frenzy may attempt to control it with a Willpower + Combat, a Willpower + Tactics, or a Willpower + Rigging test. When a character has already entered frenzy they will eventually calm down. The trigger for potentially calming down is usually related to the trigger that set them off in the first place (for example, a character in hunger frenzy would have a chance to come out of it when they sated the hunger, though of course if they failed to end it at that point they'd just continue to fruitlessly feed), but a character can attempt to end a frenzy at any time by spending an Edge. The test to end a frenzy uses the same dicepool as the test to prevent one in the first place. The threshold to keep one's self from flipping out is based on the severity of the stimulus, and the threshold to end it once it has begun is the same. All frenzies eventually end, and if a character is provided multiple opportunities to end a frenzy each subsequent attempt is made against a threshold one lower. Characters with a higher Potency are more emotionally unstable and less human, and their thresholds for avoiding/ending a frenzy are increased by half their Potency (rounded down).
Staying around people is emotionally destabilizing for supernatural creatures. There are a lot of stimuli to deal with and there are a lot of disappointments and frustrations. Every month that a supernatural creature attempts to live within mortal society, they should make a frenzy test. The threshold for the first month is 1, but it increases by 1 each additional month. A supernatural character who stays long in society will hulk out eventually. The only ways around this are to run off and meditate or periodically freak out under hopefully controlled circumstances.
Each supernatural type has a most common Master Passion (Despair for Transhumans, Fear for Leviathans, Greed for Witches, Hunger for Vampires, Loneliness for Animates, and Rage for Lycanthropes). But individual characters are by definition individuals, and may choose any Master Passion as befits their character's story and idiom. Some non-playable types can have multiple Master Passions or none at all. Still others have special rules governing their use of passions. The Soulless are in a constant state of rage frenzy that never ends; Akuma are subject to frenzies of rage, hunger, and fear; while the Pods have no passions at all (Master or otherwise).
Frenzy is not completely useless. Whilst in Frenzy, a character's Strength and Willpower are increased by 1. Although they are usually not of much use socially even so.
Master Passion Despair
Shinj [ʃɪndʒ]
-Verb (used without object)
- to absolutely flip out in existential uncertainty and despair to the point of being unable to accomplish life goals.
A character with a Master Passion of Despair is prone to fits of despondency that render them unpredictable, both destructive and self destructive. Characters subject to despair frenzy may withdraw for long periods of time and show signs that a mortal would diagnose as clinical depression. But while actually in a despair frenzy the character's actions are often terrifying to behold. Alternately comatose and prone to massive destruction, a despairing character withdraws from or pushes away the entire world. Their own work may be destroyed, as might anything nearby. A despairing rampage is born out of a combination of fear and frustration, and usually tends more to the "simplicity" of mass destruction.
Characters dominated by Master Passion Despair are affected the rest of the time in one of two main ways. Some characters seem to "make up" for their black moods by being relentlessly upbeat the rest of the time. The precipice that such a character falls off as the pendulum swings from their ability to maintain cheerfulness and completely giving up to bitterness and regret is frightening to behold. Other characters run the razor's edge of melancholy all the time. These characters wander through life wearing black eyeliner and noting all glasses as being at least half empty and possibly contaminated by spider eggs. It is important to note that whether the character is characterized better as Eeyore or Stimpy in their normal interactions with the world, that the actual frustrations required to push the character into madness are the same. The manic characters may seem happier on a moment to moment basis, but that joy is fragile - as close to the void as the permanently depressed.
Triggers for a despair frenzy usually take the form of setbacks of some form or another. Triggers to end a despair frenzy are either things that would cheer them up, or the galvanizing action of seeing something that mattered to them destroyed during their frenzy (often as not by their frenzy). Master Passion Despair is the usual drive of Transhumans.
Key skills are Survival, Persuasion, and Operations.
Master Passion Fear
"All motivations are merely a subset of fear. A fear of irrelevance."
A character with Master Passion Fear lives in absolute terror every day of their existence. Harried constantly by the need for a feeling of security that eludes them eternally, they find firsthand that Fear is a cruel and unforgiving mistress. Not a few mastered by fear dig themselves into a figurative (or even literal) hole and become virtually paralyzed with binding paranoia and a crushing fear of the unknown that limits their movements and holds them fast within some real or imaginary fortress, but this is by no means universal. Fear can be a motivator that is easily mistaken for positive, because while it can easily prevent someone from doing needful things, it can also force the fearful hand into action. When not acting is more feared even than venturing into the unknown, the terrorized act with hurried finality. It is important to note that virtually all player characters are going to subscribe to the panicked urgency school of crippling disquietude rather than the torporous catatonia school of life ruining trepidation.
Those laboring under Master Passion Fear are prone to Frenzy and Despondency, but always one more than the other. Each person's personal nightmares drive them to different irrational extremes. Triggers to enter a Fear Frenzy include both what Lemony Snicket would call the "rational fears" (such as being threatened or wounded) and the "irrational fears" (which are deeply personal jitters that are difficult, even embarrassing, to explain to others). Each fearful character should pick some of the latter, things which quicken the pulse and dominate their nightmares. Triggers to hopefully end despondency come when and where the character can find comfort, whether this is a warm bed, a dark hiding place, or the arms of a compatriot. Master Passion Fear is the most common motivation of Leviathans, which in some way accounts for how many of them leave society of all types and simply hide in the wilderness.
Key skills are Combat, Tactics, and Rigging.
Master Passion Greed
"I feed the mouth that bites me."
A character with Master Passion Greed is dominated by a need to have things. Not necessarily "valuable" things according to disinterested onlookers, and certainly not all things that have value - even to themselves. Greed is at its heart the irrational feeling of the need to acquire, since we don't even notice it (much less condemn it with such a judgmental word as Greed) when people act upon their desires to acquire things that are necessary for their survival or lifestyle. And those characters who are mastered by their greed become fixated on acquiring specific things. At any given time, a character driven by Greed will have something that they "must have" and will take special effort to get it on a regular basis. Actual frenzies may occur when a character gets "very close" to their current goal and suffers a setback. Greed is a fickle mistress, and once a character achieves their goal, it will fall to them to find a new goal and pursue that (although in some cases this may be as simple as "get a lot of money" followed by "get even more money").
Master Passion Greed can deeply affect a character's life even when they are not in frenzy. The rotating obsessions can lead to a destructive cycle of accumulation and spending. Once the character gains the money they were after, they may well spend it all on boats and other frivolities and then go back to hunting for money.
Of all the master passions, Master Passion Greed works best in children's literature, and you can find a tremendous number of examples of its placement in stories and cartoons for that reason. Players may be tempted to channel Gromgold or Gargemel, and this is not unreasonable. But it's not just antagonist wizards that are like this in stories. Many anime characters such as Lina Inverse can give a good template for the cycle of desire.
Actual frenzies from Master Passion Greed usually involve a destructiveness brought out by sheer frustration. Having gotten so close to their goal only to be thwarted, the character hurls themselves in a last ditch (often obviously futile) attempt to grab on to their desire. Things in the way are blasted with everything at their disposal and clear dangers and social conventions are completely ignored. Think the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Master Passion Greed is the most common motivation of Witches.
Key skills are Stealth, Empathy, and Rigging.
Master Passion Hunger
"I want to suck your blood."
A character with Master Passion Hunger is prone to harsh and painful pangs of emptiness, which slowly eat away at their sense of self when their power reserves are low. These fires of hunger can burn out of control and turn them into desperate, destructive beasts unless or until quenched by sapient flesh, blood, or pain. While this is obviously most commonly an affliction of those who get their power from an actual Feeding schedule or who otherwise prey on sapients, even those who don't rely on power for it can potentially have this passion. It is obviously dangerous in such characters, because unless the character's power schedule is Feeding they will remain low in power reserves (and thus potentially subject to more frenzy) even after chewing on a dude.
The hunger manifests continually in a manner that is just barely noticeable, and the unnerving awareness of the flesh and blood of those around them can easily be mistaken for simple sexual arousal. While actually in a hunger frenzy, the character's actions are more terrifying than simply unnerving. Moving with wild abandon, a hungering character dives upon others in an effort to consume what their pangs drive them to. A hunger rampage is born out of desires both to sate themselves and to cause great pain, and often results in a bloody rending of the victim's flesh.
Triggers for a hunger frenzy usually take the form of depleted Power. Triggers to end a hunger frenzy are either something which makes them lethargic (including simply being full of other foods), or having drained a victim dry. Master Passion Hunger is the usual drive of Vampires.
Key skills are Stealth, Expression, and Medicine.
Master Passion Loneliness
"We were meant to be together. If I wasn't made for you, why do I exist?!"
A character with Master Passion Loneliness is prone to excruciating, almost, paralyzing, pain. The pain of feeling incomplete, cut off, and alone. These feelings come rapidly when they are actually alone, and even creep up on them when they are surrounded by other people. Alienation is exacerbated by Master Passion Loneliness to the point of clear instability. They end up doing things to draw attention to themselves out of desperation, stunts that often as not actively push others away. Many with Master Passion Loneliness feel that what is missing from their life is a lover, but friendship or even just acknowledgement is a frequently cited lack as well.
A Loneliness Frenzy usually takes the form of a series of drastic and poorly conceived cries for help and attention. These can be incredibly destructive to things around them and even themselves. Petulant and half hearted attempts on their own life are not uncommon. While the goal is always to focus attention of the character and/or to punish others for abandoning them, the logical connection between their rampage and actually encouraging people to socialize with them can be... hard to explain. Loneliness Frenzies can be triggered by any abandonment, real or imagined. Characters with Master Passion Loneliness are prone to the worst sorts of jealousy on the smallest of provocations, and behave clingy and desperate even when relationships are seemingly normal. Master Passion Loneliness is the usual state of being for Animates.
Key skills are Larceny, Intimidate, and Artisan.
Master Passion Rage
"You're making me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
A character with Master Passion Rage is short-tempered, and when their temper goes off they completely lose it: attacking their enemies, destroying the scenery, attacking bystanders, and destroying their relationships. Characters subject to rage frenzy will often lash out at others for perceived slights, both verbally and physically, but it is not until they are pushed into actual frenzy that their true and terrifying potential is unleashed. A raging character uses every power at their disposal to smash everything and everyone they perceive as vexing or hostile. Failing that, they will turn on inanimate objects and even innocent and irrelevant people as their inability to get their hands (or teeth, or balls of fire, or whatever) on something they can readily identify as a threat or a sleight becomes itself a source of anger. A raging rampage is born out of sheer anger, and seeks to remove the source of their anger through the simplest of emotionally-triggered reactions - pure violence.
Characters with Master Passion Rage are incredibly confrontational. Their "fight or flight" reflex pretty much always defaults to "fight" even in the face of extreme danger. They also don't like losing, being thwarted in even small ways, or being ignored. In supernatural society it is taken as a truism that you shouldn't let lycanthropes drive or play cards if you can arrange to avoid it.
Triggers for a rage frenzy usually take the form of a threat to the character's person or pride. Anything that would make a human fly into a rage works too. While threats to a person are usually pretty self explanatory (injuries or threats of violence), injuries to the pride are legitimately different for different people. Players are encouraged to have some "sensitive subjects" that piss them off beyond reason. And we do mean beyond reason. Triggers to end a rage frenzy are either things that would calm them, or the galvanizing action of seeing someone they care about hurt at their own hands (often after the wounds are lethal). Master Passion Rage is the usual drive of Lycanthropes.
Key skills are Athletics, Bureaucracy, and Research.
Driving Passions: Getting Places and Doing Things
"I'm gonna do it. Just you wait and see."
While most major events in the realm of horror are soul destroying and oppressive affairs, it is not to be ignored that there are indeed things that motivate people to accomplish things. And while even that silver lining must be tempered with its own dark cloud - that indeed many people in the world are motivated to accomplish things that are despicable - it remains a source of beauty, industry, and human achievement. Or supernatural inhuman achievement as the case may be. These motivations represent the Muse in all of us, and in After Sundown are described as a character's Driving Passion.
Accomplishing things governed by the character's Driving Passion means more to the character than other things. And in the grand tradition of genre fiction, meaningful accomplishments are karmically rewarded. In After Sundown, achievement in accordance with a character's Driving Passion allows them to refresh an Edge even if it is not the end of the story. Striving to accomplish a character's Driving Passion can bring out their very best. When a character is apparently near to accomplishing something major with regards to their Driving Passion and they are faced with difficulty they may - once per story - temporarily increase one of their Physical, Mental, or Social attributes (of their choice) for the duration of the scene. Sometimes it can be wise to refrain from drawing upon this inner awesomeness even when it is available, because it can only be used once per story.
A Driving Passion is like the narrative of the character's life as they would wish it to be. When choosing a Driving Passion, try to think of what would make the character "live happily ever after" or at least end the chronicle on a positive note. They can be things like "win the love of Isolde" or "get into Law School" or whatever it is that the character's big goal is supposed to be. However, things happen and life goes on even after the love of your life has married you or moved to Cleveland with her personal trainer. Sooner or later a character's Driving Passion becomes irrelevant. And when that happens, the character either has to go on listlessly with no real Driving Passion or find something new to propel them forward. Protagonists rarely go long without acquirig a new Driving Passion.
It is entirely acceptable for characters to have their Driving Passions defined reactively by the chronicle. A character might become incensed that the president had been kidnapped by ninjas or cultists were trying to destroy the world and get a Driving Passion to put a stop to that nonsense. Most adventure stories revolve around characters doing exactly that. However, the MC should check a proposed Driving Passion to make sure it isn't stupid. A character might be able to advance a goal such as "eat a sandwich", but that's not really appropriate in most chronicles because it is too trivial. Of course, if circumstances are such that such a goal requires genuine striving against genuine difficulties (for example: the character is stuck in Limbo and there appears to be no bread), then by all means go for it.
Ethical Taboos: A Line in the Sand
"I'd do that for a dollar... that I would do for a hundred dollars... that I would not do."
Every person has a set of personal ethics that govern and proscribe how they behave. It is important to distinguish a person's ethics (what they personally will not do) from their ideology (what they personally want to get done). For example: many people want sewage to get treated, but very few people are willing to actually handle the sewage or be around the sewage processing themselves. These kinds of internal contradictions are practically universal and make for great character conflicts and growth possibilities.
But Ethical Taboos aren't purely debilitating, no matter what Nietzsche tells you. In a world with genuine mind control floating around, having arbitrary, even irrational lines that you won't cross can be extremely useful. After all, whatever things you don't want to do are things that you've spent much of your life figuring out how to live without doing, and creatures trying to puppet you around may have no idea what those are, effectively creating minefields of unexpected resistance. Game mechanically, a character whose ethical taboos are brought to the fore increases the threshold to influence them into a course of action by 1 or 2.
Princess Ethics
"That's horrible and I don't want to look at it."
Many people do not want to look at or participate in things that are ugly or repellent. While they probably have no moral objections to trash being collected, they have an ethical prohibition against doing it themselves. While perhaps not especially praiseworthy according to most ethical calculi, Princess Ethics are reasonably common. The moral of Beauty and the Beast, The Frog Prince, and Cinderella are pretty much all that Princess Ethics are to one degree or another bad; but that should not tell you that Princess Ethics are universally thought poorly of in any society. Indeed, many societies frown on people who abandon Princess Ethics, or even seem to. Just the fact that "Untouchables" exist in many cultures should tell you how prevalent this line of thinking really is.
Nonviolence Ethics
"I can't do that, people could get hurt!"
Nonviolence is when you don't hurt or kill things by your actions in a direct way that you can see. This is very often quite a different concern from taking actions that reduce the overall amount of hurt in the world, or even reducing the amount of violence in their area or even reducing the amount of violence done on their personal behalf. For example, while a person with Nonviolence Ethics will not swing a hammer into the skull of a pig, they are often perfectly happy to eat a eurodog. A severe conflict for the follower of Nonviolence Ethics is being attacked, since of course most people want to survive.
Politeness Ethics
"Of course I don't hate you..."
Mankind, even supernatural kind continues to persist in no small part because of its ability to get along with itself. And one of the strongest forces making this possible is the capacity for politeness. Each person is expected to defer actions that might offend others. And a lot of people do this pragmatically, not wanting to potentially start shit with random strangers. And a lot of other people find this automatic restriction on their activities is truly part of their being. Insulting others or taking a dump on the table is something they won't do.
Privacy Ethics
"What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."
The world's panopticon is fairly advanced, with more information collected on each person than any other person could read in a lifetime even if they could find it all in the stacks and stacks of documentation tangled up in other people's lives. And yet, a lot of people don't want to share things about themselves with others. This isn't exactly the same thing as shame, and indeed many people who feel this way are not particularly embarrassed about most of their actions, but simply feel that others knowing about them and especially finding things out about them is an insidious attack. Characters with Privacy Ethics won't talk about their personal life except under the most extreme duress.
Frugality Ethics
"I've got food at home. That hotdog guy is not getting my dollar."
The very nature of expending things is that once that has been done, the thing is expended. This finality is a source of genuine fear for a lot of people. The idea of not being able to use something later can be virtually paralyzing. People with Frugality Ethics are opposed to giving up things, even though by never using an opportunity or good it is in fact very similar to never having had it at all.
Hacker Ethics
"I may not like what you say, but I'd be modestly upset if someone stopped you from saying it."
People who have Hacker Ethics don't like being told to shut up and they don't like getting rid of DVDs that they haven't watched yet. In a larger sense, they feel that information has a life of its own and should be enabled whenever possible. Hacker Ethics provokes people to have a gut reaction of horror to censorship, even if the ideas being censored are ones they are violently opposed to.
Solidarity Ethics
"I don't care what he done, I ain't no snitch."
People who have Solidarity Ethics don't want to take actions that betray people. This is not the same as doing their 'duty' or holding up their ends of bargains. So for example, they would be reluctant to turn in one of their friends to the police or even tell another one of their friends that a third friend had wronged them. Passive betrayal, such as merely allowing a third party to harm an ally is not a violation. Solidarity Ethics are quite common among lower classes or persecuted minorities.
Other Taboos
"Whatever this is, I am not eating it."
There are so many possibilities for ethical taboos that they are quite likely infinite. And it is encouraged for players and MCs alike to make new and specific ethical frameworks for individual characters. Remember that ethics need not be adaptive or even "good", they are simply things that characters have a mental block against doing. In the real world, some people have taboos against treating people of other ethnicities as equals or treating a woman with respect. These can appear on a character sheet as "Racist Ethics" or "Sexist Ethics" or whatever. And it is important to note that while these may be a character flaw, they are also an important facet of the character's personality. Ethics are a good way to describe the good and the bad about a character, and to flesh them out more fully as a human (or monster).
Ideologies
"It is everyone's goal to have things be more like the way they wish that they were."
When we use the word ideology, we naturally think of the big political, religious, and economic ideologies that have shaped the 20th century and created the world we live in. But while the demands and counter demands of Imperialism, Capitalism, Fascism, Communism, and Fundamentalism have certainly torn the world apart and put it back together in a form that would be both unrecognizable and incomprehensible to the people of even the 1800s, these kinds of big ideas are generally not supported monolithically by nations or even individuals. There are few people indeed that argue for pure fundamentalism in any real way (even the Amish make concessions to modern medicine sometimes), and no one outside the looniest of ideologues argues for actually pure Capitalism or Communism without intrusion by the other as anything but a ludicrous rhetorical strategy.
But beyond that, the fact of the matter is that most people don't actually care how it is decided what plots of land will grow lettuce or how it is determined where that lettuce goes to be distributed to various kitchens and delivered ultimately to salad plates. It's not the kind of thing most people think about at all. So when we talk about Ideologies of characters, we are not particularly concerning ourselves with the character's personal beliefs on the extent to which the public should be invested into the oversight of and decision making process that determines the production and distribution of agricultural products, or what form that extent of public interest should take in terms of participation and representation of individuals. We're talking about what people think they should be doing and even more importantly, what they think other people should be doing in their immediate vicinity. A character's ideology determines what actions they find praiseworthy, and what actions they condemn. Some characters think that a person going to war is praiseworthy because it is brave, others because it shows commitment, and still others because it involves killing those people over there. On the other hand, different people think that a person going to war is disappointing because it is violent, others because it implies support for the current regime, and still others because it involves killing those people over there. Every action you can take can be lauded or condemned by rational people for facets about it that are essentially identical. There is truly nothing that a man can do (including nothing) that can be universally seen as good or bad.
A character's Ideology should be ranked, what are the things that people could do that would most offend your character's sensibilities? What are the things that people could do that would most impress your character with that person's virtue? Note that this is the character's actual visceral responses, not the answers they would give to a questionnaire that others might read. Lots of people say they think the ten commandments are important, but how many people are in reality more offended by rape (which is not against any of the ten commandments) than by carving statues (which is)? A good start would be to write up twelve things: six things that your character would be impressed by, and six things that your character would be offended by. Note that just because a character has an ethical taboo against doing something does not mean that they lose respect for other people who do those things. It really can go either way. A character with Princess Ethics might be in awe of people who have the courage to squash bugs and turn to them for help. On the other hand, another character with Princess Ethics may feel that people who do gross things have cooties and thus not want to touch them or be near them for fear of having to think about the gross things that they do. It is entirely common for there to be contradictions available, where the character looks at the same action from two or more angles and gets different decisions on whether something should be honored or despised.Example: Eric is a pretty chivalrous guy, and likes to think of himself as an especially manly man. He's wary of people who aren't religious or who don't conform to his expectations of gender roles.
- Honor: bravery, confidence, pulling your weight, holding your liquor, knowing sports trivia, women who dress sexy.
- Despise: hurting women, acting gay, renouncing Christianity, hurting people for extended periods of time, snitching to the cops, making things ugly
In general, if a character is being influenced towards or by something that they honor in their personal ideology, the threshold to do so is reduced by one. If the character is being influenced towards or by something they despise, the threshold is increased by one. And these changes are naturally reversed if they are being influenced against or to reject things that they honor or despise.
Changing Ideologies
That was me then, this is me now.
Ideologies do not stay static over time. Characters can be convinced through persuasive argumentation that things they thought were good were bad, or that things they thought were bad are actually good. People can be quite resistant to change, and often someone who is convinced that something is good will just go ahead and continue hating it out of habit. Even if someone agrees on an intellectual level that a group of people is in fact producing more for the economy than they are costing in civil services doesn't mean that they necessarily start liking that group of people, or even stop hating them. Indeed, prejudices run pretty deep and it is entirely frequent for a person to continue parroting arguments they themselves no longer believe rather than abandon ideological positions they've held onto for a long time.
But change does happen. Characters in an After Sundown game are often exposed to tremendously life changing events, and they do change their lives and their goals in response to them. If you've noticed people changing their political affiliations because their son came out as a homosexual or they lost their job due to plant closings, imagine how complete the turnaround can be when a person finds themselves as a member of the living dead who drink human blood to persist from night to night.