Interpret and Continue
The readings have produced two answers from reality. The table must now establish what is true of the question that was asked, then discover the particular form that truth takes in the fiction.
This phase gathers steps 7 and 8: Truth for comparison, Illusion for fictional manifestation.
Truth decides; Illusion manifests.
7. Truth
Compare reality's answers
The outcome whose Bets produce more Successes prevails on the question set by the Focus.
- Victory / Defeat: one side has more Successes than the other;
- Status quo: a tie;
- Feat / Fiasco available: the result is dominated.
A result is dominated when both conditions are true:
- the difference is strictly greater than 1 Success;
- the winner has strictly more than twice the loser's Successes.
Examples:
2–0→ dominated result;3–1→ dominated result;4–2→ simple Victory / Defeat;5–2→ dominated result;6–3→ simple Victory / Defeat.
Domination makes amplification available: the winner may achieve a Feat and the loser may suffer a Fiasco. The two are not automatically symmetrical; the fiction decides what amplification means on either side.
The two outcomes stated before the roll are not an exhaustive catalogue of what may happen. They only define what this resolution must decide. The And of a Feat or Fiasco may add a consequence, discovery, transformation, or advantage that was not contained in their initial wording.
On a tie, if the actors refuse to remain at the Status quo, the table may escalate: keep the existing Bets, let each actor who pushes the confrontation add a Bet representing their determination to end it, then resolve again.
Comparison thus establishes the outcome and amplitude of reality's answer. It does not yet narrate how that truth appears in the Situation.
8. Illusion
Give fictional form and continue
Reality's answer does not end the fiction. The Bets provide the material from which what has been established takes concrete form.
Return to the Intentions, the two outcomes in the balance, announced consequences, Zoom, and what mattered. Describe what changes: position, relationship, injury, reputation, resource, obligation, information, threat, transformation, or another lasting element of the fiction.
Subjective interpretation, under constraints
Reality's answer does not narrate by itself what happened. The table must still interpret it.
Several interpretations may be compatible with the same result. This is not a flaw to correct with a second mechanic: interpretation is a fictional judgment.
That judgment is nevertheless constrained by the Focus, the Zoom, the outcomes in the balance, the form of the result, the Situation, and the Bets recognized before the roll.
All the Bets weighed in the balance; they do not all need to appear in the narration of the result.
Some remain in the background. Others suddenly become central. A Bet that seemed secondary may, after the roll, provide the detail that gives meaning to everything that happened.
In the raid above, an overall Defeat might be narrated around the Young warrior hungry for glory who pursues an opponent too far. The Fresh horses, although placed on the favourable side, are precisely what allow him to separate from the group; the Three days of rain slow those who go after him; the Vigilant thane seizes the opportunity. Several Bets thus enter into relation to produce a chain of consequences that none contained on its own.
There is no need to decide which die “belonged” to the young warrior, the horses, or the rain. The roll answered their constellation; interpretation discovers how that answer can make sense in the fiction.
A Feat or Fiasco may add something that was not contained in the two initial outcomes: a consequence, discovery, transformation, or advantage. The outcomes define what the resolution decides; they do not limit everything reality may produce around that result.
Which interpretation makes Glorantha appear most clearly?
When several interpretations respect the result equally well, prefer the one that makes Glorantha appear most clearly.
This does not mean accumulating lore references. Look instead for what gives the result a meaning particular to this world in this Situation: communities, Runes, kinship, obligations, cults, gods and spirits, places, myths, reputation, hospitality, the dead, ancestors, or local understandings of honour, debt, justice, and the sacred.
A Victory in the raid may simply mean that the herd returns with few losses. But if Herds kept near a sanctuary of Ernalda was among the Bets, the table may remember above all that Jarstang forbade his warriors to pursue the fugitives inside the sanctuary. The raid remains a Victory; yet this choice gives the result a shape the clan may tell, judge, and perhaps bring back into play later.
Interpretation therefore does not necessarily seek the correct cause of the result. It seeks a coherent and meaningful reading of what mattered.
Before the roll: what might matter? After the roll: what now seems to have mattered?
Consequences become truths
An injury, loss, broken oath, or disgrace is not merely a “penalty.” If the consequence remains true after the scene, write it into the fiction.
It may later weigh as a Bet, become a Frame Factor, or simply change what is possible in later Situations.
If that change now belongs to the Protagonist, record it in their description. An injury, bond, reputation, obligation, object, power, understanding, or loss may thus become a new truth. See Protagonists.
That transformed Situation becomes the starting point of a new Movement when someone states a new Intention.