# Pasiones y Traiciones: The Telenovela Simulator tags: #game/rpg/pasiones-y-traiciones ![[Pasiones y Traiciones (cover).jpg|600]] **Pasiones y Traiciones: The Telenovela Simulator** is the solo RPG by **Juan Pimentel y Pimentel** (Minds Vision, 2023) that hands one person the key to a Mexican telenovela and trusts them to run the melodrama. Where [[Pasión de las Pasiones]] is a group PbtA affair — a full engine, a Master of Ceremonies, a cast of stars — this is the lone-viewer's cut: a slim, table-driven oracle that builds a saga of love, betrayal, and ever-more-outrageous plot twists one episode at a time. There's no referee and no winning, just a struggling protagonist and two dice, and the book has the decency to say so up front. ## Setting You are the **struggling protagonist** of a modern-day Mexican telenovela — humble, hopeful, and possessed of the kind of unbreakable willpower that sees one through any number of kidnappings, faked deaths, evil twins, and amnesia spells to a crowd-pleasing happy ending. The book wears its inspiration proudly: a loving homage to a transgenerational Latin-American cultural product, the sort where villains make old-school Disney look wholesome, twists pile on twists, and people cry and scream at the screen. It's a light, creative exercise, and the book is refreshingly clear that the fun is in the inventing, not in any finish line. ## Mechanics Everything in **Pasiones y Traiciones** runs on **two six-sided dice** (roll one twice if you must) feeding lookup tables, with a single d6 doing double duty as both fortune-teller and oracle: - **The title.** Roll 2d6 twice to name your show — *Brave Love*, *Faithful Secret*, that sort of thing. - **The protagonist.** Roll for a given name and surname, then for an archetype (the kind twin, the ugly duckling behind the glasses, the poor ambitious orphan) and a core challenge (the amnesia, the impossible love, the family debts). - **The locale.** A roll picks where the saga unfolds — beach paradise, luxury high-rise, a factory with despotic owners, a high school or college. - **La Historia.** Each round is one episode with six beats: the protagonist's day-to-day routine; a rolled challenge; an action and its result; a plot twist; and a cliffhanger to seed the next episode. Success is a straight d6 — 1–3 falters (a 1 is a catastrophe that ends in crying in the shower), 4–6 advances (a 6 is flawless), and the same die answers yes/no questions like night versus day. - **La Dificultad.** A roll for the protagonist's major villain and what they want — the evil-twin sibling pushing the love interest away, the business rival plotting a kidnapping, the crime lord who wants them dead. - **El Giro.** A roll for the plot twist — a faked death, a natural disaster, a major life secret revealed, the villain finally admitting a long-held love. It's a writer's scaffold more than a rules engine: the tables supply the raw material, the oracle tells you whether each scene lands, and you're openly invited to improvise past the charts. ## Editions - **First Edition** (2023) — a single, compact edition from **Minds Vision LLC** (cover by Victor Vainilla; ISBN 978-1-960473-00-4 ebook). *In the library.* ## References - [Pasiones y Traiciones: The Telenovela Simulator - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/424613/pasiones-y-traiciones-the-telenovela-simulator) - [Pasiones Y Traiciones - Mind's Vision](https://www.minds-vision.com/blogs/news/pasiones-y-traiciones) - [Pasiones y Traiciones: The Telenovela Simulator - Solo RPG List](https://solorpglist.com/item.php?id=694)