Playing Together
Glorantha Perspectives rests on two simple functions: carrying a Protagonist and carrying Time.
These functions say who makes the decisions that move play forward. They are not classes of player and do not impose a single table structure.
Carrying a Protagonist
To carry a Protagonist is to decide what they want, what they attempt, what they say, and how they react to what they experience.
The player carrying them does not decide what the world grants them. They choose the Protagonist's intention and act from what the Protagonist knows, believes, owns, and feels.
Carrying Time
To carry Time is to make Glorantha live around the Protagonists: present the Situation, act for people and powers that are not carried as Protagonists, advance what keeps moving without them, answer their choices, and maintain the coherence of the world.
Time does not decide the future of the Protagonists and is not there to defeat them.
When a resolution needs arbitration over the Focus, a Bet, or a Frame Factor, the table first compares the proposals with what is true or credible in the fiction. If disagreement remains, the person carrying Time makes the final call when the table agreement gives them that responsibility.
The simplest way to begin
For a first game, use the familiar roleplaying arrangement:
- each player usually carries one Protagonist;
- another person mainly carries Time.
In other words, the first players carry the player characters and the other person takes the role usually called the game master.
If you already know roleplaying games, you can start this way without learning a new table structure. Glorantha Perspectives works immediately with this distribution.
Other forms of play are possible
Glorantha Perspectives does not, however, depend on that distribution. A table may experiment with other ways of carrying Protagonists and Time if it wants to:
- rotate Time from one Situation to another;
- share some responsibilities of Time;
- let one player carry several Protagonists;
- share a Protagonist;
- play solo, using Runes, oracles, tables, Glorantha sources, or an AI to preserve discovery and uncertainty;
- invent another arrangement suited to the game.
These are not official modes you need to learn before play. They are possibilities made available because the rules act on the fiction rather than on powers reserved to a particular role at the table.
An arrangement works as long as everyone knows what they may decide, what they do not decide, and how the table settles disagreement.
Playing with an AI
Among these possibilities, one is becoming common: an AI carries Time while a player carries their Protagonist. The reverse exists too — an AI can carry one or several Protagonists while a person carries Time.
The game is published in a Markdown edition meant for this use, available in the Publications space. The simplest way to use it:
- download the file in your language;
- attach it to a conversation with the AI of your choice;
- then just talk.
There is no formula to memorise. "I'd like to play a game, would you carry Time?", "explain Bets to me", "why is this result a Stalemate?": ask for what you need. After the rules, the Markdown edition carries a few provisions addressed to the AI itself: what it can offer you, how to carry Time or a Protagonist, and what it must not decide in your place.
Two things are worth keeping in mind. An AI is not an authority on the rules: when it hesitates, improvises, or contradicts itself, the guide decides. And having it carry Protagonists remains experimental: it is playable, but far less tested than the usual arrangement.
Finally, a conversation does not have infinite memory. At the end of a session, ask for two things: on one side your Protagonist's living Portrait and a summary of what is still open, which you can read; on the other a file holding what Time keeps to itself, which you will keep without opening it. Attach both files to the next conversation: you will pick up where you left off without losing anything and without spoiling anything. From one session to the next, only the latest pair is needed — the files are rewritten each time, not stacked.
Using GP inside another game
Glorantha Perspectives can also be used occasionally during a campaign played with RuneQuest or another system.
When the interesting question becomes less “which skill should we roll?” and more “what really weighs on this Situation?”, the table can pause the usual system, state the Focus, build the Bets, and resolve that question with GP.
Nothing needs to be converted. A high skill, a Passion, a Rune, a reputation, a cult, an injury, or an object can simply be recognized as a fictional truth and become a Bet when relevant. Numerical values never become numbers of dice.
One handoff rule is essential:
Never resolve the same question twice.
If GP establishes that the Protagonists cross the Lunar lines but one of them emerges badly wounded, the host system resumes from that new fiction. It may express the injury, spent resources, or local consequences mechanically; it does not roll again to decide whether the group crossed the lines after all.