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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngelTears" data-source="post: 1577596" data-attributes="member: 8181">Literature typesDepends on the literature, If you take Pride and Prejudice it is all about families. No big swords in that one though. George Gissing's the nether World, the same thing. All about life in 1800's London. In Beowulf its all about going off with your kinsmen and kill a big monster. All very good fun.The real question is theme. In romantic heroic literature of the fairy tale kind, the prince goes out through scorching desert, and blistering winter, to arrive at the Dragon's keep and save the princess, whereafter he takes her back to her kingdom where they become married and live happily ever after. This kind of story telling has very little family in it, since the focus of the story is the handsome prince and his trials to free the princess, which all deals with morality in the subtext.In realist literature, the purpose is to detail the person's life in manner that strengthens the image of the man down the street, with his own personal challenges and problems. In this, social relations (character interaction) are paramount, as this is where the challenges come from, dealing with the demons in the closet and not the ones you summoned through spells and daubery.To use an anecdote, my character in Call Of Cthulhu's campaign, Horror on the Orient Express, is a fifty something Turkish businessman who comes into England once a year to cash diamonds he has acquired and turned them into pounds. How he gets tangled up in the whole business of the Sedefakr Simulacrum hunt is very simple, he sees this as a beautiful business opportunity. Because with this job done successfully he can reach new social circles and gain respectability. That mean he can put his sons through Oxford and as he becomes to know the social movers and shakers in London, he can expand his business. He has a long list of people he knows through-out Europe, translators and businessmen that he has used during the course of the campaign. In addition, he has worked closely with the Louvre in terms of the Sedefkar Simulacrum, and has become acquainted with some of the experts and understudies of the Oriental department there. He is obviously going to further this relationship by  creating an image of a relative expert in Oriental artefacts, by which he can then sell artefacts to higher members of society, and actually aid in saving rare Turkish treasures by moving them to a stable country.None of the motivations have anything really to do with the campaign, they are goals nonetheless he hopes to achieve, and are what him drive during the campaign. Of course he misses his wives, his mistress, and his children, but it comes with the job. He is ultimately doing it all for his family.The point I am trying to make is that while family may fall out of the scope of the campaign it nonetheless can be a driving influence on a character's actions and should not belittled because of its effect. Just to add some more information (poor writing I know), is that for me heroism is about motivation, the drive to stand up and continue in the face of adversity, despite of one's personal faults or difficulties. That kind of hero, is for me, far more heroic than the one who does not find greater challenges than his character sheet would warrant.</blockquote>

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