Quick Character Leverage

14 Sep, 2026

I've been running Night Tripper recently. It's fun, you should do the same. Broad strokes, it's a space opera/pulp game in the style of Classic Traveller with the explicit intent of modelling the sort of game described in the classic blog series Classic Traveller: Out of the Box by Tales to Astound. If you haven't read that you shouldn't be here reading this, go read that, it's actually the best.

Anyway. Night Tripper. After my players created their characters I had them each roll for a contact with a job. One of them got the result of Spy - Credits. Wanting more to work with I rolled for a second person and a location and got Athlete - Racetrack. So I decided one of the player characters, a professional gambler named Lysander Thyme, had been contacted by a man named Evans who he suspected to be a spy. Evans wanted his help fixing a grav-bike race and promised a tidy sum if he could ensure that star racer Phanatus Greel would throw the race. There were some other jobs, but this is the one the players wanted to pursue, so i had my homework.

Character Motivations

The first thing that struck me was the many different ways my group could go about this task, luckily that's their problem not mine. What was my problem was figuring out who this guy was, what he wanted, and what would work when the screws were put to him. First thing I did was ask folks on the Prismatic Waystation discord if anyone knew a blog post that could tell me how to get leverage on someone. After about 2 minutes with no response I decided to write my own, it's a pretty simple series of tables.

1. Loves
2. Fears
3. Needs/Desires
4. Hates

1. Person
2. Concept
3. Object

It's unfortunate that the first table doesn't use a d6.

It occurred to me that no one has one single thing that motivates them, not in real life. As often happens to folks in our business I thought Anne's seminal Landmark, Hidden, Secret paradigm could be satisfyingly applied to the problem so I rolled three times for Phanatus Greel. Here's the result:

Phanatus Greel, Grav Bike star.

• Landmark - Loves his custom Grav Bike, famously he built it himself and has been racing the same one since he was a young teen.
• Hidden - Desires comfort, Phanatus still loves racing, but it has become a means to an end: enough money to marry his lover and settle down to a peaceful life.
• Secret - Phanatus has a lover, the young Lord Avery Radnan. They are devoted to each other, but the difference in rank means Radnan's family would never approve the match.

This gave me a wealth of information about Phanatus. Not just what points of leverage he might have, but who he is, how he behaves. It gave me something that everyone knows about him, it told me where he spends his time and who with. It told me what wouldn't work just as much as what would.

After a couple sessions of information gathering and intriguing the players left a message for Phanatus' manager Impact Swain: If Impact didn't convince Phanatus to throw the race they would leak his relationship to the press, under Impact's name. I didn't even roll for it, it just worked.

Further uses

For me "Landmark" can mean what everyone knows about someone. It can just as easily mean how that person presents themselves Impact's Landmark was "Desires Power". Fairly spot on for a sports agent, but he doesn't try to hide it, it's the face he shows the world. It wasn't relevant that he also [Hidden] Loves Death and [Secret] Fears Comfort, but those are both telling as well. In the future when I have a one of character that I don't know how to characterize this is just another tool I can reach for. Maybe this noodle hawker Needs her Enemy. I don't know exactly what that means, but I know it would immediately change how I portray her.

Hopefully this is a tool that resonates or proves useful to you, I think it's something I'll be coming back to for a while.