Polaris at Gaelcon

[cthulahoops]

As part of the Indie-Games track I was organising at Gaelcon this year, I ran Polaris.  I didn't get a chance to get a group together to play it in advance of the con, so I was pretty nervous.  It's one intimidating game.  I'd scheduled it in the last slot of the convention to give myself the maximum amount of time to get used to the one hour format.  With an hour to go, I found I had three signed up and three trying to sign up, so I did the only logical thing and grabbed three of the six to play there and then so I could run the game twice.

I drawn up a simple set of characters, a politician, an astronomer, an artist and a warrior and let the players choose from the set.   I told the story of the Mistake and explained Guidance and jumped straight into play.   In both games we played lots of very short scenes,  going around the table three times or so in each hour.

Some observations:

In the first game, the player to my right became very attached to his role as Mistaken.  On his first scene for his protagonist (Lesath), he had his knight barge into the observatory and throw the astromer out on to the street.  (The building has been reallocated for military purposes.)  After a moments thought into how to resolve the conflict, I pointed out that this wasn't a scene for Lesath but for the astronomer, and swapped the roles across to resolve the conflict.  Lesath never really had a scene for himself,  with the player content to throw opposition at the astronomer (Tian Ke).  The result was that Tian Ke became the main protagonist, Lesath's player the main advocate for the Mistaken.

The second table was completely different with none of the Mistaken's pushing that hard.  Most scenes were establishing relationships between Moon and Heart, so we had something of a lack of Conflict.  The scenes were moving towards long term conflict though, and I think these sorts of establishing scenes are probably important in building emotional investment for the big conflicts later on in a longer game.

One question that seemed to occur a few times was scenes that didn't involve the Protagonist.  For example, in the second game I framed a scene in which my character's admirer was approached by demon as a follow on to a scene in which he rejected her.  This scene worked really well, but I wasn't sure if it was quite right.   Should a knight be present in every scene?

Both games went very well, and produced some great material in a very short amount of time, despite the fact that we were all new to the system.  It sounds difficult when you read the book, but in play it's fluid, easy, natural and engaging.  I love the way the guidance system keeps all players involved all the time.  I need to play more of this game.

[Dan Svensson]

so how did you do the scene without protagonist? i mean conflictwise?

[cthulahoops]

Well, there were two examples.  The first was in the game where we didn't get to good solid conflict so it was an establishing scene for later conflict.  In short:  there is a woman who loves the knight, but he refuses to spend time with her saying that he must dedicate every free moment of his life to training for combat with the demonic horde.  So, we come to the scene in question in which the woman is approached and seduced by a demon as she watches the stars alone.

I think the system should handle protagonist-less scenes fine.  Either the Mistaken can overpower anything the Moons try or the Heart can negotiate on their behalf.