Monster Motives — Advanced Old School Revival

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What's in a Motive?

Motives are narrative cues built into the monster that help you direct its behavior in the fiction. Each monster type has an overarching theme that describes what the monsters in the type are "about," from a storyteller's perspective. If you're not sure what the monster wants and why it does what it does, look to its motive for inspiration.

Motives by Type

Astral

Astral monsters are not driven by natural instincts, they are reifications of an idea. Each Astral creature embodies a single metaphysical principle—for example: duty, temptation, vengeance, purity, pain, or beauty—and acts in the world to fulfill that principle without self-reflection. Some Astral beings embody complex moral or philosophical concepts, while others, such as Elementals, express simpler fundamental forces of nature. Unlike other monsters, an Astral monster’s motive can be summarized as a maxim: a short statement describing what it exists to do.

Erinyes: Wreak Vengeance Upon Oath-Breakers
Devils: Obtain Souls Through Temptation
Archons: Protect Mortals from Forbidden Truths
Demons: Promulgate Destructive Passions

Construct

Constructs are monuments to intention without wisdom. They are creations built to solve a problem, enforce a command, or perfect a process that are left to carry out that purpose even after their designers disappear. Like Frankenstein’s monster, every Construct is a physical residue of a designer's hubris. Clockwerk, homunculi, and animated armors all represent this idea: ingenuity become monstrous. A Construct’s motive is not derived from any desire or belief, but a command embedded deep within it. You can express a Construct's motive as an imperative handed down by its maker:

Gelatinous Cube: Absorb Hapless Intruders
Invisible Stalker: Slay Thy Named Foe
Animated Armor: Defend the Crypt At All Costs

Cryptid

Cryptids are the stuff of legends. They give physical form to stories humanity tells itself about fear, greed, renewal, catastrophe, and the unknown. Each Cryptid's motive reflects a cultural universal: the Phoenix repeats the cycle of death and rebirth; Dragons incarnate the destructiveness of greed; the Bugbear manifests childhood fear of the dark; the Sphinx tests self-knowledge through riddles; and the Kraken embodies natural disaster as it rises from the ocean.

Whether a Cryptid is a one-of-a-kind monster or a member of a rare lineage in your campaign setting, its motive should read as mythical rather than individual.

Zaratan: Harbor the World’s Secrets
Kaiju: Awaken and Devour Everything
Siren: Lure the Lustful to Their Deaths

Eldritch

Eldritch monsters are violators of the known, whose very existence reveals that natural laws are not universal. Being born of the Outer Realms, they possess of bodies shaped by impossible geometry, and their alien mentality means they are often amoral thinkers whose goals are fundamentally distasteful or inscrutable to us. Eldritch monsters invalidate key distinctions that human beings rely on to make sense of the world, such as the self and other, or the past and future. Ceremorphs seek to erase individuality by merging all intelligent life into a single consciousness; the higher-dimensional physiology of Shoggoths cause madness on sight. The motives of Eldritch monsters always involve a transgression of the known.

Byakhee: Ferry Dark Masters Through Time and Space
Yith: Devour Time Itself
Ceremorph: Unmake the Boundary Between Minds

HUmanoid

Because Humanoids are social monsters, their motives stem from the conflicts they embody as a people. Humanoids exaggerate familiar societal fears of outsiders, the strictures of tradition, or the fragility of the social order, until those patterns become unfamiliar to us. In many ways, humanoids make stereotypes in our own society larger-than-life so that we, as players, can grapple with the truths and falsehoods that spin out of them. Orcs are often portrayed as warmongering tribes consumed by endless enmity; Centaurs are depicted as prideful xenophobes with short tempers. Taken at face value, these exacerbations make humanoids monstrous. Whether you embrace nuance in humanoid societies or want to keep them homogenous like in traditional high fantasy, their motives always reflect the central social conflict that embitters them as a people.

Doppelgangers: Mirror Others to Survive
Brownies: Steward Household Legacies
Pixies: Leverage Court Intrigue as Power

Undead

Undead are beholden to compulsions that manifest as a result of unresolved conflicts they had in life. They are driven by patterns of thought and behavior manifested by the traumas or obsessions that troubled them at the moment of death. Where other monsters act, the Undead enact. Each Undead monster is anchored to an inversion of its values in life. A Banshee who meets an untimely death becomes moored to the place of her murder, to warn the living of their untimely deaths. The Death Knight's commitment to evil stems from the saintliness of his knighthood being perverted in life.

These compulsions are shaped as much by folklore as circumstance. The Undead are constrained by the cultural symbols that defined them in life: Vampires recoil from faith and the natural world because those forces now represent everything they have rejected in embracing immortality. The vampire's vulnerabilities originate in the fact that symbols of its faith or elements of the natural world (like garlic, wood, or running water) have become taboos to it in death. Thus an Undead’s motive always reflects a symbolic commitment to this inversion.

Vampire: Thrive on the Blood of the Living
Revenant: Avenge My Death
Poltergeist: Delight in Tormenting My Betrayers

Wild

Wild monsters are driven by instinct. They're not capable of moral or ideological thinking, but are instead shaped by hunger, the biological imperative to reproduce, or the survival need to protect their territory. Though many Wild monsters are terrifying in scale or appetite, they remain part of the natural world and fulfill an ecological role within it. Most Wild monsters are simply the exaggerated outcomes of fantastical environments. Dire wolves, rats, and eels may grow to dire sizes due to any number of reasons: magical runoff, ancient curses, or perhaps crossbreeding with cryptids—whatever serves your fictional setting. But even the Rust Monster's hunger for metal and magic items must be rationalized as part of an evolution whereby the creatures survived natural selection by devouring adventurer's shinies. When we assign Wild monsters motives, we must think about how their thriving and multiplying is guided by natural instinct.

Will-o’-the-wisp: Feed on Creative Thought
Deepspawn: Cultivate Pools of Trash
King of the Apes: Seek Curiosity and Embrace Savagery

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