Time

Time is the game function that keeps Glorantha alive around the Protagonists without deciding their story for them.

The main gesture is simple: look at the Situation and make what matters live.

When you are not sure where to direct your attention, look first for:

• who wants what, and what may happen if no one acts;
• who is bound to whom, through affection, debt, oath, rivalry, or obligation;
• what community and culture give weight to the choices at hand;
• what place, Rune, power, or myth makes this Situation specifically Gloranthan;
• what is changing, and what may continue to matter after the Situation.

You do not need to fit all of Glorantha into every scene. Make a few meaningful elements live clearly enough for the players to notice them and choose what they want to do about them.

Present enough of the world for players to make real choices. Listen to their intentions. Act for people and powers with goals of their own. Let consequences transform what remains. When the outcome becomes uncertain, use the resolution rules.

Your Glorantha will come to be

The Great Compromise brought the world into Time. From then on, events could follow one another, leave traces, and become History.

But Glorantha itself gives us a strange perspective on that History. King of Sartar looks back on the Hero Wars from the distant future of Harshax's New Time. By then, that past has already become material for stories, interpretations, contradictions, and reconstructions.

Glorantha Perspectives takes that opening seriously and offers its own interpretation: the future History of your Glorantha is not already written.

What matters depends on what your table encounters and chooses to look at.

What follows depends on what the Protagonists do.

You therefore do not need to know all of Glorantha before you begin playing. Nor do you need to fear discovering later that a book describes a person, place, or event differently. The sources give the world its depth and continually offer you more things to discover; they do not define the path your game must follow.

A character nearly forgotten by the chronicles may become essential. A major event may remain distant. A barely described place may become the center of your Hero Wars.

You are not looking for the right way to explore Glorantha. You are discovering what matters in yours.

Then you act.

And what happens becomes its History.

Yet Another Glorantha

Glorantha Perspectives sometimes imagines this idea as a myth.

Far in the future — under Harshax, or perhaps long after — a HeroQuest is said to have led a Dragon to Arachne Solara.

From their union came innumerable eggs.

Within each of them sleeps Glorantha.

No two are exactly alike.

Perhaps these eggs truly exist. Perhaps this is simply how some sage of an unimaginable future would explain why accounts of the Hero Wars never entirely agree.

It makes no difference to those who live inside.

No one lives in a variant of Glorantha. Everyone lives in Glorantha.

The myth thus closes a loop begun with the Great Compromise: Time makes History possible; History transforms Glorantha; and, from a distant future, that History in turn becomes story, memory, and myth.

That is also why this game function is called Time.

It does more than make the days pass. It keeps alive a world in which actions have consequences, consequences leave traces, and what remains can become the History of your Glorantha.

When the Protagonists enter God Time, or when play takes place before the Great Compromise, this function still acts: it keeps alive the myths, roles, powers, places, and events that exist outside Time.

Time keeps Glorantha alive, including what exists outside Time.

This section develops procedures for preparation, adjudication, running Situations, and interpreting consequences.