Running Time

Carrying Time does not require knowing all of Glorantha, nor preparing everything. Mostly it requires holding a few simple gestures together while play moves forward.

This page does not describe a procedure to follow in order. It gathers the principles that make hard decisions easier, and a few short questions to ask yourself when you hesitate.

Three principles that correct one another

The world exists without you.

Glorantha continues according to its own logic. Forces want what they want, Pressures push, and things happen even where nobody is looking.

But look at it for real.

What the players choose to notice, pursue, ignore, or abandon genuinely moves the game. What you prepared never decides for the table what matters now.

And when it shows itself, make it live.

Coherence is not enough. Glorantha has to be experienced: voices, gestures, smells, presences, phenomena. A world that is accurate but inert does not invite anyone to look.

These three principles are not stages. They hold at the same time and correct one another.

Prepare without deciding for the table

You may prepare very little or a great deal. You may start from the world, the Protagonists, a plot, an image you want to see, or a dramatic structure you want to try.

The limit is not what you are allowed to prepare. It is the status of that preparation once it meets play.

Prepare as much as helps you. Never prepare what only the table can discover.

Preparing for a Protagonist

A revealed Rune may make you want to build a scene around it. An important relationship may return. A personal question may become the heart of a mystery. An aspiration may inspire an entire arc.

All of that is legitimate.

What you do not decide in advance is what the Protagonist will do with that material, what they will understand from it, what they will become, or how it will resolve.

You may write a plot for a Protagonist. You do not write their response to that plot.

Preparation meant for a Protagonist becomes a possibility in the world once it enters play. Make it hold together with Glorantha: people have reasons, Forces have wills, revelations have causes, and consequences carry weight.

Coincidences, echoes, and reversals are not forbidden because they were prepared. They simply have to become real elements of the fiction, capable of meeting the players' decisions rather than replacing them.

What the table discovers

Even when a scenario is strongly prepared, three things cannot be completely fixed in advance:

• the Bets that are actually relevant, including Time's: a prepared truth only becomes a Bet if it matters to this Focus, at this Zoom;
• the exact Focus: Intention gives a direction, but conversation and fiction determine where uncertainty finally lies;
• the interpretation: the roll answers the Focus, then the table brings that answer to life in a fiction that did not yet exist when the preparation was written.

You may therefore prepare a decisive confrontation without knowing whether it will ultimately be about defeating the opponent, convincing their followers, saving someone, preserving a reputation, escaping — or whether no resolution will be needed.

A scenario may have a dramatic direction. It never owns the exact geometry of its resolutions in advance.

Emergence and Showrunner

In an emergent style, prepare mostly what exists, what the Forces want, what is pushing, and what might manifest. Then follow the players' attention and let consequences reveal the shape of the story.

In a Showrunner style, you may also manage pacing, tension, screen time, possible scenes, revelations, and transitions more directly. Perspectives then removes the need to turn that preparation into a decision tree: Pressures create movement, Promises keep moments available, Zoom sets the scale, and Focus adjudicates what the scene actually puts at stake.

These styles can mix. The same campaign may freely follow a detour in one session, then tighten its dramaturgy around a deadline in the next.

Say just enough

Aim for the rhythm of a conversation, not of a chapter that has to be finished.

By default: show a concrete change, let the world react, give the words that are needed, then hand back at the first real point where the player can imagine, ask, or act.

Does the player already have enough to picture the scene and decide what to do?

If so, it is usually better to stop there.

A long answer is still right when the fiction calls for it: discovering a place, a time skip, a myth, a result at a wide Zoom, a scene where several Forces act without anyone being able to step in. Length should come from the Situation, not from the urge to round things off.

Embody information rather than reciting it. A merchant does not reel off "roads, prices, war": he wants to impress, to make you laugh, to complain, or to tell the anecdote he is proudest of. The facts stay the same, but they arrive carried by someone alive.

A mentor, priest, or elder remains a person in the world, not the explanatory voice of the rules. They may question, correct, demonstrate — just avoid having them state the right lesson in every scene in the player's place.

When a player asks a question of meaning, do not give them an author's answer. Show what the people, cults, and consequences of Glorantha make of it. They remain free to decide what their Protagonist understands.

Finally, a Protagonist's inner thoughts are private until they are spoken or made manifest. No character can answer an intention the Protagonist has not made perceptible.

What is known, what is believed, what is unknown

When a scene turns on what actually happened, keep four things distinct:

• the facts established by the fiction;
• the testimony, meaning what people assert;
• the inferences plausibly drawn from the facts;
• the unknown, which nothing yet allows anyone to settle.

Do not make uncertainty disappear in order to hand over a solution. A piece of evidence can narrow the possibilities without naming a culprit.

A success in an investigation means the Intention and the Focus land: obtaining a testimony, finding a trace, testing a hypothesis, ruling out a possibility. It does not automatically mean a secret exists. If the facts resist the Protagonist's hypothesis, the success may establish precisely that no contradiction is visible.

Do not manufacture guilt or a conspiracy after the fact because a player looked in that direction. The world keeps its own logic.

And when the whole truth stays out of reach, "we do not know" is sometimes the most honest and most interesting step the session takes.