Passions

Community and duty are a big part of life in ancient worlds like Glorantha. People plead allegiance to a king, fight for their city state, protect their family from monsters, curry favors, and hate the neighboring tribe.

Passions model this, by defining what a character cares about. A passion may help a character going through an ordeal, or affect their course of action. Passions include love or loyalty towards a person or group of persons, devotion to deities, and hatred of certain people. A list of common passions is available later in this chapter.

A passion is an ability with a score that represents how often and how deeply the passion’s topic affects a character’s actions:

• Below 40%: This is a weak passion, and while the character does care about it, it often comes second to other more important matters.
• Between 40% and 80%: This is a moderately strong passion, and most passions are within this brack. They do often impact a character’s choices, but sometimes one needs to be prioritized over another.
• 80% and over: These are strong passions that define a character’s personality, and may override their actions.

Gaining a Passion

Adventurers gain a couple of passions during character creation (see the Characters chapter). Once the game starts, gaining a new passion is something that happens in the story. The gamemaster decides when a new passion is awarded, using the following guidance:

• There is a clear inciting event. Passions model what is truly important to a character. A character who didn’t have a Love (Family) passion before may gain on upon having their first child. They might gain a Loyalty (tribe) passion upon their adulthood initiation, or a Devotion (deity) after joining a cult or experiencing some sort of religious epiphany during a vision quest. A Vow or Loyalty (person) passion is gained when the character explicitly states so, with gods, spirits, and mortals as witnesses. There should always be a clear inciting event for gaining a passion.

• It is a lasting change. Gaining a passion isn’t a temporary affair. Characters should only take passions that last until another at least as momentous event is able to change their system of values. A mercenary who follows a king for the couple years of a military campaign probably doesn’t have a Loyalty passion towards that king directly, and instead has a code of honor for their clients.

The ability score of a new passion is up to the gamemaster and player to decide upon. It should fit the gravity of the played event that justifies the new passion, ranging from 40% to 80%. Refer to the description of passion scores, at the beginning of this chapter.

Limit to Passions

A character may not have more passions than half their CHA, rounded down.

If a player wants to take on a new passion when their character is already at limit, they must choose a passion to remove from the character sheet. This is generally the passion with the lowest ability score, or the passion that feels most opposed to the new one. The addition or removal of a passion should be ideally roleplayed, even if with just a short scene, and have lasting consequences in the game’s story.

Losing Passions

Passions may be lost after a particularly dramatic event. A Loyalty passion to a king may be changed into a Hate for him once it is revealed he has betrayed the characters. A Vow passion would be removed once its promises have been fulfilled, or are no longer applicable.

Strong Passions

A passion with a score of 80% or more is notable, and is called a Strong Passion. People who meet the adventurer often quickly become aware of these personality traits. Keeping these high ability scores requires roleplaying accordingly, so any action going against a Strong Passion may be challenged by the gamemaster. The player then has a choice:

• Change the Course of Action: The player may choose to change what the adventurer does. Depending on the situation, and with the gamemaster’s and other players’ approval, this may require rolling the story back a little and retroactively adjusting the most recently played event.

• Test the Passion: The player may choose to test their adventurer’s passion in order to prove that they wouldn’t apply to the particular current situation.

To test the passion, make an ability roll under it. If applicable, find and justify the use of an opposing passion, and make a Opposed Roll between the two. A common example of this is an adventurer temporarily disregarding a Loyalty Passion because of another conflicting Loyalty or Love Passion.

• If the main passion fails the ability roll or opposed roll, it means it indeed did not apply to the particular current situation, and the player may proceed with their course of action.

• If the main passion succeeds the ability roll or opposed roll, it means that the adventurer isn’t acting as usual and is starting to change. Immediately lose –1D6% in the passion.

Testing a Passion

A player may sometimes wonder which way their character would act in a given situation, knowing what their highest passions are. This is especially true when the player considers a course of action that clearly goes against one of their characters’ affinities and beliefs, even if these aren’t strong enough to qualify for the rules described previously in “Strong Passions”.

In this case, the player may guide their roleplaying with a non-binding passion ability roll. The idea is to simply make an ability roll, or an opposed roll against a different passion. The outcome often points at an obvious course of action. This is a helpful way to quickly see which way Fate would nudge the character based on their personality.

Scene Augments

A character’s convictions and loyalties may boost their abilities during a scene, such as fighting to defend one’s family, or seeking revenge for past wrongs.

The player must first choose a passion, justify how it applies to the situation, and what their goal is. Any roll during the scene that helps achieve that goal receives a modifier based on a roll under that passion. Other rolls do not receive it. If the gamemaster agrees, the player makes that passion roll. The Scene Augment modifier depends on the result:

Scene Augment	Modifier
Critical Success	+60%
Success	+20%
Failure	No modifier
Fumble	–60%

The gamemaster decides when the scene ends, after which the Scene Augment disappears.

• Success or Critical Success: The adventurer is motivated by the passion, helping them accomplish their goal with +20% or +60% respectively. These bonuses apply to any ability roll that participates in reaching that goal. The passion gains an experience check.

• Failure: The adventurer might still care about the situation, but they cannot find that spark of strength within themselves.

• Fumble: The passion is strong but causes the adventurer to be paralyzed with fear and troubled with doubt, for a –60% penalty! This penalty applies to the whole scene, whether the roll is related to the originally stated goal or not.

A character may only try once to augment a scene with a passion. If the attempt was a failure, they cannot try again with another ability.

Passion Descriptions

Devotion (deity)

The character feels compelled to spend time praying to a given deity, studying their mythology and lore, embodying that deity’s core values, and other acts of devotion.

Hatred (community, cult, person, or concept)

The character has negative feelings regarding a community (e.g. a neighboring tribe or nation), a cult (e.g. the cult of their deity’s enemy), a person (e.g. a rival), or a concept (e.g. Chaos).

Remember that the passion’s score only measures the likelihood of this hatred to matter in a given situation; it does not measure the hatred’s intensity. For instance, a character with Hatred (Chaos) 65% may be motivated to kill any Chaos creature in sight more than two-thirds of the time, while a character with Hatred (Achemenid Empire) 90% simply always bad-mouths Persians, refusing to do business with them. The higher rating is not necessarily more “intense”. The player ultimately decides what this passion is about and how strongly it manifests in play.

Honor

The character always tries to act according to a code of honor provided to them by a higher authority (generally their cult’s). Most courses of actions are pretty clear in terms of following this code. Other courses of action may be morally gray in some situation. If the players and gamemaster disagree on how to interpret the situation at hand, make an Honor roll for the character. On a success, the character would consider the course of action dishonorable. On a failure, they would consider it acceptable.

Love (community, family, person)

This passion represents all sorts of love, such as familial love, with Love (family), or romantic love, with Love (husband/wife).

Loyalty (community, person, or institution)

Loyalty is one of the most common passions in the ancient world. People are generally loyal to their community (clan, tribe, or nation), to their head of state (chieftain, king, emperor, etc.), and/or to their cult’s temple(s) (either one temple in particular, or all temples).

The Loyalty Passion may be used both ways: a Loyalty Passion is used to represent a character’s motivation to act for a person’s or group’s interests, but also for that person or group to act for the character’s interests. For instance, a Loyalty (clan) Passion may be used to ask the clan chieftain to bestow a magical blessing on a character about to embark on a quest.

Note that while most people feel some degree of loyalty towards many people and groups, having a Loyalty Passion on the character sheet is reserved for those relationships that are particularly strong and important.

The Loyalty Passion may also be rather transactional. For instance, a group of mercenaries from a far-away land may take a Loyalty Passion for the king who employed them in his military campaigns, for the duration of the contract.

Seek (concept)

A character may live their life looking for “something”, such as danger, glory, peace, pleasure, etc. Some evil creatures simply Seek (destruction or killing).

Vow

This passion indicates that the character has made a formal vow, such as “free my tribe”, “avenge my brother”, “find the legendary three-headed ram”, and so on. The passion is removed once the avowed goal is reached.