Aspirations
An aspiration represents a specific goal you or your character wants to accomplish. It must be something they believe they can accomplish. Aspirations are not easy, mundane, or routine tasks and must be something that represents at least something of a challenge or complication or cost to accomplish. Aspirations are split into short-term and long-term. Every character should have at least one of each upon character creation.
SHORT-TERM ASPIRATIONS
A short-term aspiration is something that can be reasonable accomplished within the next few in-game days that's not easy or guaranteed. It should be something the character struggles with and will face challenges to accomplish. When you fulfill a short-term aspiration, you gain 1 surge, lose the aspiration, and can come up with a new one to replace it.
LONG-TERM ASPIRATIONS
A long-term aspiration is something that takes weeks or longer to accomplish. It could be something like, "avenge the death of their father", "achieve the perfect technique", "solve the mystery of their wife's disappearance", or "atone for their sins during the war".
When you first gain a long-term aspiration, put 0 next to its name. This is it's aspiration counter.
Each time a character achieves an accomplishment that moves them significantly closer to achieving their long-term aspiration (as determined by the GM), check one of the boxes next to the aspiration and gain a surge.
Once a long-term aspiration has all 3 boxes checked, you erase the check marks, increase the aspiration counter by 1, and start over continuing this process until the aspiration is completed or abandoned. The GM determines you have finally achieved the long-term aspiration, you gain an amount of XP equal to the aspiration counter and remove the aspiration from your character sheet.
Abandoning Aspirations
You can spend 1 surge to abandon an aspiration and remove it from your character sheet.
End of Sessions
At the end of every session in which you fulfilled at least one short-term aspiration or made at least 1 box of progress with a long-term aspiration, you get +1 XP per aspiration (max 3).
Critical Success: As a success but +2 surges/XP.
Success: +1 surge and +1 XP per pivotal event and +1d6 XP at the end of that gaming session.
Failure: -1 surge per pivotal event. If you have no surges to lose, you either lose the motivation and suffer a random negative condition at stage 1 until the end of the next session or lose 1 XP instead. If you lose the motivation, your secret is exposed, your loved one perishes or turns against you, your reputation is ruined, you lose your heirloom, etc.
Critical Failure: As a failure but -2 surges/XP and the negative condition is stage 1d4.
Critical failure/success is determined by the GM. For example, if you were trying to rescue a friend and you did help them but they were ultimately still sold into slavery for months before you were able to rescue them, that might be considered a failure. If they died horribly before you were able to save them or so emotionally scarred by trauma that they were radically changed and no longer had any loyalty to you, that would also be a critical failure. A success would be rescuing them within days while a critical success would be rescuing them long before they endured any of the more severe hardships of slavery such as torture, starvation, etc.