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LONG AGO, THE PEOPLE WERE DYING AT THE END OF THE WORLD…

Every Polaris game must begin with that sentence. It’s a rule of the game, and that’s the best summary I can think of: it’s a game concerned with helping a group structure a certain kind of story, a bittersweet tale of tragedy and heroism. It does that very, very well, but because it is so focused and has many unique qualities, it won’t appeal to everyone. So I’m going to start by explaining who won’t like it and why before I get into the details.

Who won’t like this game

People with very conventional tastes in RPGs.
This is a “Forge” game, a game built outside the main industry production/distribution network, and one that has little in common with D&D and other big-market-share RPGs. Characters are defined by only three stats, and none of them tell you which PC is the strongest or the prettiest or the smartest. There is no GM: the roles of the GM are distributed amongst the group, so that everyone has a PC (or “Protagonist”) and everyone takes a partial GM role for everyone else. Although a single d6 is occasionally rolled, the game is mostly driven by player negotiation and invention. So someone looking for a standard GM-players, “roll your strength score” type game will be either disappointed or very surprised by Polaris.

People who insist on logical, scientific settings
The world of Polaris doesn’t make scientific sense and doesn’t intend to. The game is set in a “long ago” society at the North Pole and makes no attempt to explain how these people survive the frigid conditions. The society had a perfect age before the coming of “Dawn.” How it could be that there were people in the Arctic who had never seen the sun long enough to develop a society is likewise not explained. The game simply isn’t concerned with logical cause and effect: it’s trying to create myth, not “realism,” and is more concerned with consistency of tone, atmosphere, and theme than consistency of physics or ecology.

People who want everything clearly defined
While the rules are clear and specific, in describing the setting Polaris evokes rather than defines. There’s no timeline of what happened when in the city-state of Polaris, but rather a telling of alternative stories that might explain its decline. The game not only refuses to establish one “true history” of Polaris, it strives to create a feel where no one would attempt to. Again the best word I can think of is myth: the game is trying to get you to tell tales of an impossible place, tales that feel true even though they obviously can’t be true, so there’s no problem if the tales are contradictory. Likewise, this isn’t a game that provides stats for monsters and NPCs: the mechanics don’t require such stats, and the game has no desire to pin things down that way.

People who find their “fun” only in humor, ultimate victory, or character advancement
Polaris describes itself as “Chivalric tragedy at the utmost north,” and tragedy is exactly what the game is intended to provide. By the rules, the story of an individual protagonist can only end in three ways: the protagonist dies, the protagonist becomes corrupted and joins the forces of the Mistaken (demons, the bad guys), or the world ends. While protagonists do become more capable over time, they also move inevitably from optimism to pessimism. This is not a game that tells light stories, or funny stories, or stories of the gradual increase in power and wealth before a final triumph over all enemies. In my opinion, it also doesn’t tell angst-ridden stories or tales of base people doing what they can to “get theirs.” The game as written only tells the tales of people striving to hold off inevitable defeat.

People who have trouble taking things seriously, especially ritualized things
As I mentioned at the opening, the game prescribes a phrase that must be said to open the game, and another that closes the game, and another to introduce each protagonist for the first time, and another to open each scene. The designer suggests that other rituals might be used as well, but absolutely insists on these “key phrases.” He has good reason. These key phrases help to invoke the setting and mood of the game, and they also help to draw stronger lines between “game time” and “non game time,” something that’s always potentially helpful in face to face gaming but especially so in a game as serious and “heavy” as Polaris. Conflict resolution features several additional key phrases that must be used as the players negotiate the outcome. While I wouldn’t want Paranoia or even Earthdawn to tell me what I have to say to start the game, here it makes perfect sense. But if you can’t imagine your group doing that without giggling, this isn’t the game for you.

People who aren’t comfortable trusting their gaming group
This is a game that explicitly asks for trust among the participants. Although there are clear rules for resolving conflict, the rules involve negotiation among the players and are hardly proof against someone who actively tries to violate the spirit of the game.

What it is
If you haven’t been scared off by any of that, you’ll find a lot to be in love with in Polaris. Let me try to explain what you get if you buy it and then I’ll get more into what’s so amazing about it.

The product
Polaris is a 140-page 5½” by 8½” black and white book. It features a table of contents but no index. Six pages are taken up by advertisements. The rest of the book provides setting material (about 20 pages), game rules (about 60 pages), and extensive play aids (about 40 pages). Each chapter begins with a one- or two-page art piece. I’ve had the book for six months and have no complaints about its durability: while I haven’t used it extensively, it has survived a move and a lot of carrying around without losing pages or anything.

The setting
Polaris is a city-state at the top of the world that evokes Camelot more than anything. There is a king (also called Polaris), his queen (unnamed but with several epithets), the knights who serve as the queen’s guard, and the captain of the knights, Algol. Originally these people did not know the sun but only the stars, so they are all named for stars (the game includes a very extensive list of star names to help with this). But now the sun has appeared, and reappears every spring to dominate the sky all summer (remember, we’re at the North Pole), and with the sun came corruption. Whatever the exact cause of the corruption, Polaris is not what it once was. Now it is composed of four strongholds circling “the Mistake,” an opening into the pit of hell. Out of the Mistake pour the Mistaken, demons intent on destroying all that is left of Polaris.

Yet the people on the whole are passive in the face of this threat, idling their time away in gaudy parties and petty politics. Only the Knights Stellar recognize the threat and fight it. The PCs all play the roles of these knights, fighting against the Mistaken and their own inevitable fall into death or corruption.

The game: character definition and control
Polaris is designed for four players, and while variant rules are provided to allow for the “3-5 players” identified on the cover, it’s obvious that the game is going to work best as written, with four participants. Normally each participant would control a protagonist, although it is possible to use only a couple of protagonists even with four participants, because everyone has a role in each protagonist’s play.

The way these roles work is by assigning each player to be a particular “guide” for a given protagonist according to where they sit around the circle. The person who primarily controls the character is called the “Heart” for that character. This is pretty much the conventional “player” role: you say what the character does, thinks, and feels. The person sitting opposite is “the Mistaken” for that character; this is an adversarial role, trying to introduce conflict and temptation and controlling all enemies or opposing forces. To the left of the Heart is the “New Moon,” who controls all the characters who have a close, personal relationship with the character (and any minor female characters in the game). Opposite from the New Moon is the “Full Moon,” who controls characters who have a more social or hierarchical relationship with the protagonist (and minor male characters).

So in a scene in which a knight meets with her lover, the Heart plays the knight and the New Moon acts out the lover, with the Mistaken trying to introduce conflict into the scene. Once conflict occurs, the Heart and the Mistaken negotiate the outcome according to fairly strict rules, with the moons acting as advisors and referees. (More about conflict later.)

Each Protagonist’s character sheet is meant to include everything important happening in that character’s story. So enemies are listed in the “Mistaken” section, close friends under “New Moon,” etc.

The Knight’s unique characteristics are defined by four types of Aspects: Offices (social positions, like “Renowned Champion” or “Aide to Senator Altair”), Fates (people, events, or whatever that are “tied, irrevocably, into your story,” like “Event: Betrayal of the People,” or “Idea: the Greatest Knight”), Blessings (artifacts like the Starlight Sword every knight starts with, or “Memory Crystal”), and Abilities (skills, knowledge, or competencies, like “Lore of the Stars” or “Skill: Musician”). The game lists several sample Aspects but players can also create their own.

Each protagonist is further defined by four numerically rated scores. Ice measures the knight’s connectedness to and commitment to society and helps the knight to struggle for Polaris and others around. Light measures a more internal and independent focus, the ability to fight for oneself, by oneself. When a die is rolled to resolve conflict, it’s a single d6 compared to either Ice or Light (the moons decide which guided by the rules). Both scores start at 1 and improve with experience. New protagonists start with a high Zeal score, indicating optimism and commitment to the cause. This declines over time, eventually being replaced with a Weariness score, as the knight comes to recognize the futility of the fight.

The game: play, conflict, and experience
Play of the game involves two modes, “Free Play” and Conflict. “Free Play” is what some of us would call “roleplaying it out,” just participants declaring what characters under their control do without any use of game mechanics. Conflict gets invoked when two participants disagree about what happens or when someone thinks something ought to have a price attached.

In Conflict, the Heart and the Mistaken negotiate the outcome of the events using several key phrases like “But only if” and “You ask far too much.” This is probably the most complex part of the game, but there is a cheat sheet included, and I suspect that it would seem pretty natural once you’d done it a few times. (If I ever get to play, I’ll let you know.) Rules in conflict are strict: you can only use certain phrases in certain situations, and some require that you check off one of the protagonist’s aspects to use them. Depending how the negotiation goes, the Heart and Mistaken may agree to a certain outcome (say, that the knight’s lover is under the control of a demon but will not be killed by it) or they may come to an impasse that must be resolved by rolling a die. The die rolling is simple: 1d6 compared to either Ice or Light: lower or equal means the knight “wins” or succeeds.

Experience gets checked either when a knight fails in a roll or anytime a knight shows signs of corruption: callousness, sympathy with the demons, hatred of the people, etc. Experience is checked by rolling a die and comparing it to Zeal/Weariness. Success gets an increase to Ice or Light and a move toward maximum Weariness, “failure” means that you refresh all your checked off aspects.

What’s to love
I’ve already given away a lot of this, but I want to highlight some really good features of this product, including a couple I haven’t explicitly mentioned yet.

It’s beautiful
Polaris doesn’t have full-color art from a dozen different professionals. What it does have is stylized white-on-black drawings by Boris Artzybasheff that remind me of Greek paintings and medieval manuscripts. The art is perfect for the flavor of the game, and each piece includes a caption that attaches the art more strongly to the game itself.

But that’s not all that’s lovely. The layout and typefaces are simple, clean, and appropriate, and the writing is fantastic. I read much of this book the way I read poetry I love: to savor both the sound and the sense of it. The poetic language is fun to read and effective in evoking the mood and setting of the game. In fact, it’s so good that I’d be a little hesitant to play with someone who hadn’t read at least the setting parts of the book.

It’s soundly designed
The game mechanics are cleverly put together to keep everyone involved at all times and in equal ways. Everybody gets their turn to be the protagonist, the villain, the spurned lover, the angry authority figure. Characters grow more powerful and more despondent with each failure.

The mood and theme are powerful and consistentThis is a game that really does tragedy. The game consistently encourages players to “go for the throat” in making bold statements. Even in free play, you’re encouraged to say not “I take a swing at him” but “I knock his blade aside and slash through his heart!” (Conflict will resolve it if the others don’t think you should succeed at this.) And at all times, someone is charged with introducing temptation, conflict, and trouble. The flavor text, the examples, and the setting material all serve to put me in mind of Shakespearian or Greek tragedy or the best versions of the Arthur legend I’ve encountered. This game does exactly what it sets out to do.

Overview and Ratings
I love this game and recommend it strongly. Not everyone will like it, as I’ve said, but if it’s your kind of thing, you’ll find a lot to love. I’m giving it the top rating in each category because if Ben Lehman asked me what to change in the second edition, I’d barely have any suggestions. But “5” can mean different things to different people, so I want to elaborate and defend my ratings a bit.

Style
The top rating here should not be misconstrued to mean that this game has the same visual impact as the latest $50 book from Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf. But I find the art, the layout, and the writing to be compelling and totally appropriate. This is a stylish game with a stylish setting. If the book is a little understated, well, that fits too: in this game, the heroes favor the subtle stars over the gaudy sun.

Substance
Top rating here doesn’t mean that the designer included everything that could possibly be included. The four remnants of Polaris are named but not described. The general nature of the demonic forces is briefly discussed, but there’s no list of all the demons you might encounter. All of this is deliberate and right for the game. The details will be invented by the group to fit the story being told, rather than defined by the canon game line. But you have everything you need here: evocative description of a rich setting and a clever, focused game system. You don’t need to buy a supplement or download anything (except maybe a bigger character sheet) to be ready to go. If I were going to suggest anything else to be included, it would just be a distinctive key phrase to mark the end of a scene. Otherwise, everything I want is there. The only thing that isn’t included is three other friends who’d enjoy something like this. And if you’ve already got that, well, I envy you.

I can only close as every Polaris game must close:

BUT THAT ALL HAPPENED LONG AGO, AND NOW THERE ARE NONE WHO REMEMBER IT.

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