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Protagonists and Time

A few words are enough to make clear who does what around the table.

Player​

Anyone taking part in the game is a player. Depending on how the game is organized, a player may carry a Protagonist, take responsibility for part of Time, combine several of these responsibilities, or alternate between them.

Protagonist​

A Protagonist is a person, group, or other entity whose intentions, choices, and transformations the game follows.

Carrying a Protagonist means deciding what they want, what they attempt, what they say, and how they react to what they experience.

Time​

Time is the game function that keeps Glorantha alive around the Protagonists.

The function of Time includes, among other things:

  • presenting what the Protagonists can perceive;
  • acting for people, groups, and powers that are not carried as Protagonists;
  • advancing what continues to act without them;
  • preserving the coherence of the world;
  • responding to the Protagonists' actions;
  • introducing the unexpected when the Situation calls for it.

Time is not there to defeat the Protagonists, protect a plot, or decide their future.

Time makes the world live. The Protagonists choose what they do with it.

Why Time?​

In Glorantha, the Great Compromise gives Time a special place. Divine powers are bound to the order they accepted, while mortals live within Time and can still choose, act, and change the world.

The name, however, refers to a game function, not only to the cosmological phenomenon of Time. That function remains when the Protagonists leave the temporal world: in God Time, or when play takes place before the Great Compromise, Time brings to life the myths, roles, powers, places, and events that exist outside Time.

The term therefore points to an essential distinction: the framework exists, but the Protagonists' destiny is not written for them.