Chaos
"Chaos is not strong because it has better weapons. Chaos is strong because it does not play the same game as we do."
— An initiate of the Storm Bull, before charging a horde of Broos.
Chaos is a breach in the conditions that allow the world to exist.
It is not simply a force of destruction, a morality of evil, or an extreme form of Disorder. Glorantha's Cosmos already contains Death, change, violence, contradiction, innovation, and powers capable of breaking established laws. All of these can be terrible without being Chaotic.
The Cosmos transforms and composes. Chaos negates.
A proposition becomes Chaotic when it no longer seeks to act among the possibilities of the Cosmos, but demands that one of its fundamental limits cease to be true — without recognizing any internal limit that would allow that negation to coexist durably with the rest of the world.
Chaos can therefore make the impossible possible. But it does not create a new harmonious law of the Cosmos: it leaves a Breach, a negation that tends to become more true, more general, and harder to contain.
The Cosmos determines what is possible. Chaos can open the impossible. The dice still say what happens.
What Chaos is not
Chaos is not automatically:
- evil — a being may commit atrocities without bringing Chaos into play;
- Disorder — Disorder belongs to the Cosmos;
- destruction — Death and destruction have their place in the cycles of the world;
- innovation — something new may enrich the Cosmos if it enters into relationship with what already exists;
- transgression — breaking a social, religious, or political rule does not necessarily open a cosmic breach;
- a Worldview — Chaos does not replace Theism, Animism, Logic, Mysticism, or another way of reading reality.
So the criterion is not: "Is this shocking?" or "Is this forbidden?"
Ask instead:
What condition of the Cosmos does this action require to become false? And does this proposition still know where to stop?
When Chaos is waiting
Chaos is not an ordinary difficulty or an additional modifier.
It may enter a Situation when a Breach is genuinely possible: contact with a Chaotic power, a ritual threatening to overflow its limits, use of a contaminated substance or power, a cosmological transgression, deliberate invocation, or another circumstance established by the fiction.
At the Death step, if the Protagonist can reasonably understand the danger, Time announces it before resolution:
"Chaos is waiting for you."
When possible, also state the threatened limit: the boundary between the living and the dead may fail to close again, your flesh may no longer keep its shape, something may learn how to enter through your mind.
The player may then keep their Intention, change approach, or refuse that risk like any other important consequence.
Three situations involving Chaos
Not every relationship with Chaos begins in the same way.
| Situation | What has happened | How to play it |
|---|---|---|
| A human is exposed to a Chaotic possibility | A Breach may open now | Chaos is among the announced consequences. Resolution determines whether the Breach actually takes root. |
| An initiate or desperate person deliberately invokes Chaos | Chaos is being practised | The Protagonist accepts that a limit of the Cosmos will temporarily stop closing off a possibility. That possibility becomes an admissible Focus, then resolution proceeds normally. |
| An Ogre, Broo, or another being is born already bound to Chaos | Chaos is already constitutive | The Chaotic principle already exists in their Portrait; there is no initial contamination to resolve. Play its consequences and contradictions. |
The cosmological history of an Ogre and that of a Broo are not identical. For the procedure of play, however, the question is the same: Chaos is already there when play begins.
Opening a Breach
A Breach is not a corruption track. It is a new major truth about the Protagonist: the trace of a condition of the Cosmos that has ceased to hold for them.
When a Chaotic consequence occurs, record it as a new Chapter in the Living Portrait. A Breach is important enough to hold its origin, its anti-cosmic proposition, its manifestations, the relationships it transforms, the means used to contain it, and the consequences of its successive expansions.
Give the Chapter a formulation that first describes what has become false.
For example:
- Breach — My flesh does not need to keep a stable form.
- Breach — Death no longer completely separates me from the living.
- Breach — A consciousness can be separated from the person to whom it belongs.
- Breach — Living flesh can become food that is owed to me.
A visible sign may accompany this truth — a deformed limb, diseased skin, hunger, foreign voices — but the sign is not the Breach itself. It is only one manifestation of it.
An involuntary Breach
If the Protagonist has taken a Chaotic risk without deliberately invoking Chaos, use the normal resolution of Glorantha Perspectives.
The Focus may bear directly on contamination when that is the important uncertainty:
Does the thing manage to take root in them?
It may also bear on the price of an action whose success is already established:
Do they close the gate to Hell without becoming a passage themselves?
When the Focus genuinely opposes the Protagonist to the opening of the Breach, read the results as follows:
| Protagonist's result | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Feat | They resist the Breach and the Feat may add a coherent advantage: understand what was trying to enter, protect someone else, close the source... |
| Victory | They resist. No Breach opens. |
| Status quo | The threat remains without having won yet. The Protagonist may withdraw, seek another path, or escalate. |
| Defeat | A Breach opens. |
| Fiasco | A Breach opens, and the Fiasco adds a coherent Chaotic consequence. |
There is no second "corruption roll" afterward. The resolution has already decided what was uncertain.
Deliberately invoking Chaos
A Protagonist may ask Chaos for what the Cosmos does not allow.
This does not grant a few additional dice or an automatic victory. The character asserts that a relevant limit will no longer close off this possibility during this Situation.
A Frame Factor that previously made the Focus inadmissible can thus be transgressed. The table states the newly possible Focus and resolves it normally.
Chaos does not grant victory. It makes possible a victory the Cosmos forbade.
For example, a companion's soul has already left the world of the living and no available magic can call it back. The Protagonist performs a Chaotic rite and asserts:
Death does not need to separate forever those who were united.
This rupture does not automatically return the dead. It now allows the table to ask reality a question that was previously closed:
Do they manage to call their companion back among the living?
Resolve normally, then also apply the following Chaotic consequence:
| Result | Intention | Breach |
|---|---|---|
| Feat | The impossible is achieved. | The Breach opened long enough to make the Focus possible, but it is closed before taking root. If a Breach already existed, it does not expand. |
| Victory | The impossible is achieved. | The Breach opens or expands. |
| Status quo | Nothing is secured yet. | The player may stop: the impossible is not achieved and the Breach does not progress. If they choose to escalate, the Breach expands before resolution begins again. |
| Defeat | The impossible is not achieved. | The Breach opens or expands anyway. |
| Fiasco | The impossible is not achieved. | The Breach opens or expands, and the Fiasco adds an additional Chaotic consequence. |
The price therefore never buys success. A Protagonist may violate the limits of the Cosmos, fail, and still have given more reality to what they allowed in.
The Feat is the exception: it does not mean Chaos was never present. It means the rupture was exceptionally mastered and closed before becoming a new lasting truth about the Protagonist.
Chaos remembers
A Breach that has taken root now belongs to the fiction.
Time does not activate it arbitrarily as a penalty. Time brings it back when it genuinely matters in a Situation.
Depending on what it implies, a Breach may become:
- a Bet, when it genuinely favours an outcome;
- a consequence, when a Situation manifests or expands it;
- a Frame Factor, when it has become constitutive enough to change what is now possible;
- the very object of a Focus, when resisting its influence becomes important and genuinely uncertain.
Chaos remembers exceptions.
If a Protagonist has established that their flesh does not need to keep a stable form, that truth may later help them cross an impossible space — but may also matter when a wound refuses to close, when contact transmits something, or when they no longer know exactly where their body ends.
Resisting a Breach
A Breach does not impose a periodic roll of willpower, sanity, or corruption.
The player retains the usual authority over their Protagonist's Intentions. Time does not freely decide that they give in to a Chaotic impulse.
But if the Breach genuinely conflicts with what the Protagonist wants to do, and if that contradiction is important and uncertain, it becomes a Situation like any other.
The Focus may then ask:
Do they keep control of themselves until they find a way out?
The Breach may be a Bet on the side of surrender. Bonds, oaths, belongings, Runes, or other truths about the Protagonist may weigh on the other side when genuinely relevant.
If there is no important uncertainty, do not roll.
Feeding a Breach
A Chaotic proposition tends to lose the limits that still contained it.
When a resolution says that a Breach opens or expands, do not remove an abstract point or add a corruption level. Ask:
What limit that still contained this proposition now ceases to hold?
Rewrite the Chapter's statement in a less limited form if necessary, then add the manifestations and consequences that have become true.
For example:
Death cannot take my brother while I hold him.
may become:
Death cannot take those to whom I am bound.
then:
Death cannot take what belongs to me.
and finally tend toward:
Death has no authority over what I refuse to surrender to it.
Such a transformation may pass through moments that can be described as:
- Exception — this was true here, this once;
- Appetite — the possibility seeks to return in nearby Situations;
- Obsession — it begins reorganizing the Protagonist's relationships and choices;
- Constitutive principle — it is no longer something that happens to them: it is a condition of their existence.
These words are not a mandatory track. They describe a direction: the exception progressively ceases to be an exception.
As the proposition expands, the rest of the Living Portrait may need to change. A Bond may become impossible, an Affinity lose its meaning, an Attachment become corrupted, a memory or oath cease to organize the person as it once did.
The loss is not an arbitrary price paid to an outside power. It follows from the character's new ontology: some former truths simply can no longer coexist with what they are becoming.
Beings who are already Chaotic
A Chaotic creature does not automatically gain additional Successes and does not replace its Worldview with a "Chaos Prism."
An Ogre, Broo, Vampire, or another creature bound to Chaos normally acts from its culture, cults, relationships, and way of understanding reality.
Its Chaotic principle is nevertheless already part of its Portrait or Frame.
For a Broo Protagonist, for example, it might be stated as:
Chaotic principle — Any flesh capable of bearing my offspring can become a host.
This principle is not a power the player activates, nor an excuse to take control of the character away from the player. It is a truth the fiction must take into account.
The player chooses how their Protagonist lives with this obsession. They do not choose that it does not exist.
When this nature conflicts with an important Intention — protecting a community, respecting hospitality, preserving a companion, keeping an oath — the contradiction may become a Focus and be resolved normally.
When Chaos becomes constitutive
A Protagonist may eventually cease to be someone who carries a Breach and become someone whose existence is organized by it.
They may continue to be played. This transition does not automatically turn the character into an antagonist or an automaton controlled by Time.
But their Chaotic principle is now a major truth of the Portrait, able to close off some ordinary possibilities and structure their relationships with the world.
You do not sink into Chaos by filling a corruption track. You sink into Chaos when an exception you allowed into your existence progressively ceases to be an exception.
Go further
This page is enough to play Chaos in Glorantha Perspectives.
To understand why innovation is not necessarily Chaotic, compare the Vampire with the Brithini and the Mutator with the mystic, examine major Chaotic deities, or explore the Lunar paradox of Illumination, see the deeper discussion:
Understanding Chaos: cosmology, transgressions, and edge cases.