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Worldviews

In Glorantha Perspectives, a Worldview is neither a profession, an intellectual method, nor the kind of magic being used at that moment. It represents a lived ontology: the deep and spontaneous way in which the Protagonist thinks the world works.

A Worldview does not describe what you do. It describes the world in which you think you are doing it.

When reality must answer an uncertain Situation, Bets are built in the same way for everyone. What changes next is how the roll is read: each Worldview teaches the player to direct attention somewhere different.

  • Theism — look for manifestation and continuity with divine action.
  • Animism — look for presences that recognize one another and can form a relationship.
  • Logic — measure the whole rather than isolated signs.
  • Mysticism — look for what can be dissolved or transformed in the opposition itself.
  • Draconic Thought — look for patterns that open a choice between attachment and detachment.

When should weakened and heroic Worldviews be used?​

Each Worldview presents an ordinary reading, a Weakened Worldview, and a Heroic Worldview. These are not three permanent character levels, nor a progression to unlock. They are three ways of reading the same Worldview when the fiction changes the scale or quality of the relationship to the Cosmos.

They can notably be used to:

  • express the weakening of a Protagonist — when something compromises the relationship through which their Worldview becomes operative, the weakened reading can make that fragility felt in resolution;
  • express the rules of another world — in the Otherworld, and especially in the Gods World, some relationships to the Cosmos may become more immediate or absolute. A Heroquest may therefore place participants in a Heroic Worldview because the world they have entered operates at that scale;
  • express an intentional difference in power — when a Protagonist, entity, or Force clearly acts at another scale, a weakened or heroic reading can express that difference directly without artificially inflating the number of Bets.

These uses may combine. A mortal may, for example, enter a world where the powers facing them act through Heroic Worldviews while their own relationship to the Cosmos remains ordinary — or even weakened.

The mode is chosen before the roll, because the fiction and the Frame justify it, never after seeing the dice. Bets continue to be established normally: unless the Situation itself changes what can count, the mode changes how the roll is read, not the number of dice.

A Worldview is not a mask​

A character does not choose the "best" Worldview for a scene.

A Grey Sage of Lhankor Mhy may study a Malkioni treatise, understand a sorcerous argument, and reproduce a foreign procedure without becoming a Logician. They normally remain a Theist: Gods, Runes, and mythical events remain operative realities of the Cosmos for them.

Likewise, an astrologer of Buserian or a scholar of Irripi Ontor may calculate, observe, classify, and reason with great rigor while inhabiting a theist world.

A Malkioni may perform a comparable calculation, but for a different ontological reason: they understand the Cosmos as intelligible through Law and Reason.

The calculation may be the same; the world in which it makes sense is not.

This is why Logic is not "the Worldview of intelligent people," scholars, or rational characters. The Malkioni — and, in another way, the Mostali — normally belong to this Worldview because it corresponds to their conception of the Cosmos.

Foreign practices become Bets​

Cultures circulate, trade, fight, and influence one another. They therefore borrow rites, techniques, and bodies of knowledge.

The Pol-Joni, for example, may adopt animist practices needed for life in Prax without ceasing to be fundamentally Orlanthi and therefore normally Theists.

The mechanical distinction is simple:

  • what the Protagonist knows, owns, practices, or has learned feeds their Bets;
  • what they believe the world to be determines their Worldview.

Truly changing Worldview​

A Worldview can change, but not like changing tools.

An event must truly transform the Protagonist's relationship to the Cosmos: deep conversion, an initiation that overturns their understanding of reality, an irreversible mystical experience, a draconic transformation, or another comparable shift in the fiction.

Changing Worldview does not mean deciding to look at the world differently for a moment.

It means discovering that you can no longer look at it as you did before.

Some forces do not replace the Worldview, however: they modify it, make it permeable, or place it in crisis. That is the role of Influences and transformations.