Your character’s passions provide mechanical advantages in situations that their rage, fear or nobility is triggered. Their obsession also has a mechanical benefit. This is enabled through its link to one of their identities.
In this stage:
- Optionally, give your character up to 2 additional identities.
- Choose one identity that best supports your character’s obsession.
- Mark this on your character sheet.
Choosing additional identities
Your character will begin with at least two, and no more than four, identities. Up to this point, each character will have already added two. So at this stage you may add up to 2 further identities.
The previous advice for choosing an identity still applies. Additionally, you may decide to:
- combine multiple aspects into a single identity (such as Disgraced Ex-Childcare Worker), or
- break them down into several discrete identities (such as Disgraced and, separately, Ex-Childcare Worker).
You do not have to add any more identities at this point.
Examples can be found in the Quickstart Character Concepts and Identities.
Identity considerations
You will only have 120 points to allocate among all of your starting identities, whether you assign 2, 3 or 4 to your character..
Taking more identities with lower starting values can increase the range of your character’s expertise, at the expense of effectiveness in their early career. However, as you are more likely to fail identity checks with lower values, you are also more likely to gain experience that allows you to increase them after each session.
You can add further identities during play, but they must be acquired by completing cabal objectives. That will require the support of the entire group.
Each identity you give to your character should complement their backstory and support the character concept you have for them.
An obsession cannot easily be changed, so choose wisely. Adepts can never remove their magick obsession, even if they stop practising. While there are no rules to support other characters to change obsessions, these may be triggered through mental trauma, learning magick or pursuing and immersing in a new objective. Any change should be agreed with the GM.
Defining identities
As before, it is a good idea to flesh out mundane abilities now and agree them with the GM before moving on:
- Describe some Of course I can examples for mundane abilities now. These should be consistent with the character concept. It isn’t expected to be a definitive list, but should help to qualify and give context to when the identity might kick in during play.
- Decide which ability the identity substitutes for when making general checks.
The usage conditions and mechanical effect of a supernatural identity should be sketched out at this stage. The details and narrative effect can be fleshed out shortly.
Other features and identity points can be allocated later, as can adept spells, thaumaturge rituals or avatar channels.
The obsession identity
Once you have settled on your character’s starting identities, choose one that best supports their obsession, in the context of their backstory.
Mark the character sheet to identify it as their obsession identity.
If you are an adept, then you must choose your magick school identity as your obsession identity.
During play, you can always flip-flop a roll when you make an obsession identity check,
Reference: UA3 Book 2: Run p30 | p29 pdf. UA3 Book 1: Play p42 | p41 pdf.