Skip to main content

Start Playing

A game of Glorantha Perspectives begins in a Situation: a place, people, relationships, and something that deserves your attention.

The game's fundamental gesture is simple: look at what matters.

  • For the Protagonists: what matters to them?
  • For Time: what matters around them?
  • For Perspectives: what matters here and now, when the outcome becomes uncertain?

You do not need to know everything or take everything into account. Start with what the Situation makes visible and important. Glorantha Perspectives is played by paying attention to the world, not by searching for the right rule first.

Choose where to go next​

You can read this guide in order, but you do not have to. Enter through whatever interests you most:

  • Glorantha gives you a few landmarks for knowing where to look in an immense world without learning everything first;
  • Protagonists shows how characters take shape from what matters to them;
  • Time explains how the world keeps living around the Protagonists and how to prepare Situations;
  • Perspectives contains the heart of the system: Bets, resolution, Worldviews, and transformations of reality.

If you want to see immediately what makes Glorantha Perspectives mechanically distinctive, go straight to Perspectives. You can come back to the rest of the guide afterward.

Resolve​

The Protagonists act freely within a Situation. Most of the time, the fiction moves forward without rolling dice. Resolve only when the outcome is possible, important, and genuinely uncertain.

The Grand Cycle describes eight steps, but you do not need to memorize them as eight separate rules. Start by remembering this:

What do you want? What do you risk? What question are we resolving, and at what scale? What matters on each side? Let's roll, read, compare, then see how the world responds.

That sentence already follows the eight steps in order. The list below only unfolds them:

  1. Movement — Intention. State what the Protagonists, Forces, or other involved actors are actually trying to achieve.
  2. Death — Consequences. Make important consequences visible when they are not obvious.
  3. Harmony — Focus and Zoom. State the Focus, its Zoom, and the two outcomes in the balance.
  4. Stasis — Frame and Bets. Identify Frame Factors, then the Bets that matter here and now, stating which outcome each favours.
  5. Life — Roll. Roll the dice corresponding to the Bets on each side.
  6. Disorder — Worldview. Read each roll according to the Worldview that applies to it to obtain reality's answer.
  7. Truth — Comparison. Compare the answers to establish the outcome and the amplitude of reality's answer.
  8. Illusion — Manifestation. Give that answer a fictional form from the Situation and the Bets, then continue from what has changed.

This sequence forms the Grand Cycle of resolution according to Glorantha Perspectives. The Runes give the procedure cosmological depth, but knowing their symbolism is not required to use it.