[Polaris] City of Ice and Starlight, Session 5

[ptevis]

(Protagonists: Sirius, leader of the Knights; Matar, minstrel turned Knight; Lesath, hot-headed Knight haunted by his father's demon murderer; and Grumian, freakishly large Knight seeking just to be left alone.)

It's taken my group four sessions to really get Polaris figured out, but last night everything came together into a beautiful explosion of drama. Here's what I think we did that made it work:

1) Unifying central action. In most of our other sessions, we'd played out individual stories: Sirius dealing with his lover's possible infidelity, Matar investigating his lover's death, Lesath seeking to avenge his father's murder, etc. Last night, however, we all got sucked into the same problem when Grumian got dragged before the Senate to stand trial for crimes against the people. (At the end of the previous session he had accidentally killed an innocent women who was possessed by a demon.) Sirius appointed Matar to act as advocate for Grumian, while Senator Elektra (Grumian's mother and in pretty much everyone's Mistaken) assigned Sirius to prosecute. We spent pretty much the whole time doing our footwork before the trial, and it gave the session a sense of drive and focus that had been lacking in previous sessions. I think this is because even thought we'd all be involved in previous sessions through our portrayal of Heart NPCs, this time our Protagonists were involved, which gave us greater investment. Still, I don't think we could have done a session like this before now, as we weren't comfortable enough with the game to pull it off. (The final scene was the trial itself, with Matar essentially sitting out (his Heart player was Grumian's Mistaken and so played the various NPCs), Sirius and Matar making their cases to the court, and then Grumian's Heart and Mistaken negotiating the outcome of the scene. Despite it being nominally Grumian's scene, it really was everyone's.)

2) Clear understanding of everyone's themes. After a previous session, once we'd figured out how the game worked and what we wanted out of our character's stories, we talked about it. I had decided that I wanted Sirius' story to be about hubris and isolation, while Matar's player wanted his story to be about what it meant to be a Knight and what one had to give up for it. Once we talked about these things, the Mistakens had a much better idea of what sorts of conflicts to frame. What we really should have done is written these on our character sheets as Themes, but during character creation that didn't occur to us. (In fact, it didn't occur to me until just now why those things on the character sheet are called Themes, but that's because I'm a little dense. Perhaps an explanation of this in the book is in order?)

3) Rolling, rolling, rolling.  Once you've lost a little a bit of Zeal, it gets harder to lose more (unless you're a crappy roller like Matar's player). This means that once your Zeal gets to about 2, you can really afford to roll Experience to get Themes back. It also means that the Mistaken needs to "And Furthermore" like there's no tomorrow to get the Heart to roll. In the last session or so we've moved out of "But Only If" habits and almost solely to "And Furthermore" and "You Ask Far Too Much." This also means that Protagonists can harden their hearts, turn against the people, and in general play to the motifs of the game with less danger of losing Zeal than before. We had shied away from despairing before, but by this point in the game we had both the support of this system and the weight of the Protagonists previous experiences to draw on, and it rocked.

How does this jive with other folks' experience with Polaris? If these things are true, how can we make these things easier for new player's to recognize?

--Paul

[Bret Gillan]

Hey Paul! Great write-up!

I've only played two sessions of Polaris, but what you're saying rings true.

1) Our group moved into "unifying central action" in the second session, revolving  around the Fate Demon Ziggura, and around the disgrace of the Knights (they had a lot of bad stuff going down). It was really nice to have a first session where the Protagonists kicked off their own stories, and once some plots had been interwoven utilizing the shared Fate, then start bringing them together. I wonder if anyone else has played the game with the Protagonists deeply interwoven from the get-go.

2) After session 2, we were still scrabbling a little bit with Themes. I noticed that I used them the most out of anyone, but I don't feel like any of us, myself included really "got" Themes. In a few sessions, maybe. Mostly, though, they were just character traits that you spent to say, "You ask far too much." In our post-game discussion, we did talk a bit about the Aspects that never got used, and framing scenes around them in order to get some use out of them and explore them more.

3) I hear you here. Josh was practically intentionally pushing his character to make Experience rolls, and when he hit 2 his character became a monster. Refreshes out the wazoo.

I don't know if any of these require explicit clarification in the book, though. I mean, part of the fun of this game, for me, has been the realizations when I "get" something, like how to frame conflicts, or how to back my "opponent" up against the wall by making him exhaust his Themes, etc.

[Ben Lehman]

Paul-- thanks for the write-up!

It's great to get a follow-up on the game, and I'm glad to hear it's going well for you.  Are the moons being played more actively now?

yrs--
--Ben

[ptevis]

Much more, yes. Another of the players and I were talking last night, and she mentioned that she's actually started to think about scenes with her Moon characters ahead of time.

If you're interested, I can stash the recordings somewhere you can grab them.

--Paul

[Ben Lehman]

Ahw, jesus, Paul, that's like crack to an addict.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  Yes.