# Pasión de las Pasiones *Created:* 2026-09-21, *Modified:* 2026-10-17 ![[Pasion de las Pasiones (cover).jpg|600]] **Pasión de las Pasiones** is the [[Powered by the Apocalypse]] game by **Brandon Leon-Gambetta** that finally answers the hobby's long-neglected question: what if all of this were a telenovela? Published by **Magpie Games** off the back of a Kickstarter, it takes the machinery of *[[Apocalypse World]]* and reroutes it clean away from post-apocalyptic hardholders and gunluggers toward love, loss, betrayal, and the occasional character very dramatically failing to die. It's warm-blooded, romantic, and completely unembarrassed about its own melodrama — the sort of tonal confidence the hobby could stand to steal more often. ## Setting You are the **stars** of a fictional telenovela: the leading characters whose lives the camera follows, not the actors who play them and not the crew behind them. When your character isn't in the current scene, you slide into the cheap seats as the **audience** — the family on the couch after dinner — and the rules will periodically ask for the audience's opinion, because a telenovela is nothing without someone gasping at the twist. The show itself lives in a **playset**, a framing setting that dictates the week-to-week conflicts. The book ships with two: **La Rosa Querida**, a grand hotel whose ownership is suddenly and violently in dispute, and **El Sabor del Amor**, a multigenerational family restaurant. The game is proudly **Latinx** — a love letter from a Peruvian-American designer to the novelas his family watched — and its default season runs six sessions, each 2–4 hours, ending in a finale that ties up the loose ends (or at least pretends to). ## Mechanics PbtA through and through, but with a signature twist on the dice. ### The Engine Roll **2d6** and add your modifiers. The twist: instead of a stat, most moves have you roll **with the questions**. Your playbook poses a short list of yes/no questions about the *fiction* — "Are you doing this for love?" "For vengeance?" — and each yes is worth **+1**. On a **7–9** you get a shaky partial hit and choose a small consolation; on a **10+** you choose more or get it clean; on a **6–** the MC makes something worse happen. It's not about how strong your character is; it's about how convincing the scene's emotional stakes are. ### The Moves The engine turns on **eight basic moves**: *accuse someone of lying, act with desperation, demand what you deserve, express your love passionately, manipulate a superior, process your feelings out loud, spot something out of place,* and *strike out with voice or violence* — a list that scans like a syllabus for emotional warfare. On top of that sit **peripheral moves** and the flashback moves, most potently **reveal a shocking truth**, which lets you roll to retroactively rewrite what the audience thought it saw, the camera flashing to the "real" version of the scene. ### Conditions and Death There are no hit points. Instead you **mark conditions** — each one gives +1 to one specific move and −2 to another, so taking a beating literally reshapes how you play. When all your condition slots are filled, you go into **meltdown**, which is exactly as dramatic as it sounds. And the death move, **face certain death**, is gloriously inverted: the worse you roll, the more spectacularly you survive. A miss means you were never really in danger. A 10+ hands your fate to the *audience*, who pick from a shared, cross-off list that runs from "sexy scar" to "amnesia" to "actually dead" — and an option, once chosen, can't be used again by anyone. Nobody stays dead in a novela unless the table decides they should. ### The Master of Ceremonies One player runs the show as the **MC**: not playing a star but setting scenes, voicing side characters, and steering the chaos under agendas like *make the telenovela feel heightened and romantic*, *keep the characters' lives volatile and unstable*, and *play to find out what happens*. Between episodes there's **advancement** — new moves, cross-playbook features, and introducing NPCs — and each session opens with the "**Last Time On…**" recap, because a telenovela never lets you forget the cliffhanger. ## Editions - **Ashcan preview** (2017) — the game's first public form, a fully playable sample circulated to drum up support well before the release it was a promise of. - **Core Book** (2023) — the complete, crowd-funded standalone: six playbooks, two example playsets, the playset-construction rules, and the full MC toolkit. *In the library.* Despite the word "playset" in its chapter titles and its telenovela-adjacent premises, **Pasión de las Pasiones** is emphatically **not a [[Fiasco]] playset.** It's a full PbtA engine with a real MC, and the only thing it shares with **Fiasco** is a love of watching people ruin their lives in public. ## Supplements - **Playsets** (2023) — the two example playsets shipped as standalone downloads: **La Rosa Querida**, a posh disappearing-owner hotel, and **El Sabor del Amor**, the Salazar family's restaurant La Náutica, an '80s show reboot. Each carries its own soundtrack picks, role questions, previous-episode prompts, extra moves, locations, and NPCs. *In the library.* - **Play Materials** (2023) — the fillable playbook sheets for all six archetypes — La Belleza, El Caballero, La Doña, La Empleada, El Gemelo, El Jefe — each with its look, relationships, "Last Time On" options, moves, conditions, meltdown, and advancements. *In the library.* - **Supporting Cast Deck** (2023) — a deck of NPC cards, each with a hook and a move, to keep the show's side of the frame stocked. - **Dice Set** (2023) — the game's custom dice, because rolling with the questions deserves better than a pair of store-bought sixes. - **Tormentas del Corazón** (2026) — the big expansion: 9 playbooks and 10 playsets carrying the engine out of the everyday and into magic and stranger worlds — the American West, a 19th-century Mediterranean, an alebrijes kingdom, a planet ruled by a galactic church — plus GM materials. - **Corazón de las Estrellas** (2026) — an *unofficial*, fan-built sci-fi playset by **Mike Ferdinando**: the crew of the starship *Corazón* in the 23rd-century Interstellar Alliance, a telenovela with just enough space battles to reel in the sci-fi crowd, complete with ship-board NPCs and an orders-and-technobabble set of extra moves. *In the library.* ## References - [Pasión de las Pasiones - Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/pages/pasion) - [Pasión de las Pasiones product line - Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/collections/pasion-de-las-pasiones-1) - [Pasión de las Pasiones - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/409558/Pasion-de-las-Pasiones) - [An Interview with Brandon Leon-Gambetta - Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/blogs/passion/an-interview-with-brandon-leon-gambetta-designer-of-pasion-de-las-pasiones) - [The Young and the Beautiful: Pasion de las Pasiones, a telenovela TTRPG - D20 Collective](https://d20collective.com/blogs/divinations-from-the-collective/the-young-and-the-beautiful-pasion-de-las-pasiones-a-telenovela-ttrpg) > [!note] Editor's Note > > The engine is genuinely good at what it does — romantic escalation as a mechanical dial — and it's a refreshing antidote to the hobby's usual grimdark. My only complaint: a game this invested in melodrama deserves an actual theme song table. I'm keeping my own list of Spanish-guitar bangers on standby.