#RPGaDay2025 - Day 6 - Motive

Day 6 of #RPGaDay brings us the prompt "Motive."

In an RPG, every PC, every NPC, and some inanimate objects have one, and in the case of my players, they're super paranoid about it and usually wrong from the first impression. 

This isn't anything overtly complex or more than a subconscious thought in your process.  If someone would cast Detect Motive on a village full of people, most are working through the lower end of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs at any given time.   The environment will also impact the motive.  There's a huge range of reactions comparing somebody who desperately needs a coffee before heading into work and someone physically starving, and willing to do anything to get it. 

Motive does not need to be thought through to completion either.  Self-preservation by individuals or organizations throughout history have shown the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 Well into our current Gamma World campaign, our group, the De Facto Explorers, traveled to KIA Academy a bright and shining star of Ancients knowledge... and the home to one of the retired PCs.  KIA's claim to fame?  They've recovered Ancients technology related to road construction, asphalt, concrete bridge and overpasses, even signage and painting lines.   It's as if they were originally settled in the offices of some Department of Transportation or something like that.  Besides the "modern" roads up to five miles in all directions, most of the population lived in a large facility from the entry points at Level 0 up to the archives, administration, and high level official residences in levels 7, 8, and 9. 

To the PCs, KIA was paradise, (non-military) Ancient tech was plentiful. food was available, and for a small bribe, one of the road maintenance facilities were willing to recharge power cells.   They were even thinking about relocating from their hometown.  

KIA Academy was the perfect place. 

Until the began looking for things that weren't available, such as weapons.  

Enter: the sub-levels of KIA.  

I always envisioned sub-level one being slightly better than the underground level in the movie Demolition Man.  Food and supplies do make it down there, there is an abundance of violence, and very little upward mobility.  If you didn't fit the smock-clad mold of KIA's society, human, mutant, or other, you were stuck on Sub-Level One.   

They had discovered up to eight sub-levels, each worse than the other.  

The De Facto Explorers could wrap their heads around most of the concepts, plus the first three sub-levels were still safer than wild towns of the outside world.    But when they met Razorback, the ruby glasses were removed.  

Razorback was a drunk wolf-mutant with cybernetic augmentation.  They found him on Sub-Level Two, laying on the street, at the mercy of a gang of ferrets.  They cleaned him up, just to hear his story.  

KIA Academy was the perfect place, because they accepted all the refugees, like Razorback, a nd threw them into the sub-levels, out of sight, out of mind.  

And when an outside threat presented itself?  They impressed every able-bodied person in the sub-levels first, barely trained them, and sent them out en masse to either stop the aggression, or die trying.  Razorback was one of the lucky ones...

In  the end, this story, followed by even worse stories from the levels below, convinced them to perform one more job KIA, as scouts to observe unknown troop movements around their borders.  They did their job, reported back for payment, and left so quickly, they abandoned a research droid, RHA-9.

Razorback's story has gotten better.  As these armies got closer to KIA, hundreds in the sub-levels fled before the facility shut down access and drafted the able-bodied.. again.    He was last scene at around the gates of Fair-Town, and hopefully is gainfully employed, partially sober, and no longer tormented by ferrets.   Who knows what his motive is now...