Hi.

So I'm fiendishly late with the next playtest draft of the game, which I hope is why this forum is quiet, and not that everyone is going "ecch, this game isn't worth talking about."

I'm hoping to get the playtest draft up later today, but while I was looking through my files, I found this essay about Polaris, plus the beginning of a second one.

I think that, honestly, this is really more about Narrativist play in general. But I'd be curious to get reactions, opinions, and people's thoughts about whether or not these two things should be official game text:

On Morality and Polaris--

Judge your characters.
The characters of Polaris are put in truly awful situations, and have to make choices of the sort that I hope you, my lovely and loyal players, never have to make. And its up to you to judge these choices -- was it the right or the wrong choice? Was there a right choice?
Go ahead, speak your mind. Be ruthless about it. You can even, if you like, be unfair. Yes, "it isn't yours to say" but say it anyway. They won't mind. They can't hear you. They're just characters you made up.
It's important that everyone get in on this. If one player (often the Heart) gets so attached to the character that they start defending them blindly, that's a recipe for frustration. Because, in the end, all knights fail.
This is important: You do not win this game, in any sense. There is no victory for the knights that is not tainted with the taste of ashes, for those of them that do not die will turn against the people and, in their deepest hearts, the knights all know this, especially the veterans, whose doom lurks closer every hour. And, looking at the rules, you should know it, as players. This game is about loss. These stories are tragedies.
Your knight is going to fail, either in battle or in his own heart. Be prepared for it, and when the moral failings come, welcome them, for moral failure is the great key to all tragedy.
You, as players, need to see this coming, you need to understand this moral fall as it goes on, or else this game will be nothing other than an exercises in frustration for you. To gain that understanding, you have to pass moral judgment on your characters.
Judge your characters.
Really.
A lot of people are uncomfortable making morality judgments about others, or even themselves. While this is arguably a positive quality in real life, it is a terrible thing in the production of art, particularly collaborative art, particularly moral art. Polaris is not a game, as you might have gather by this point, about being nice to the characters, nor is it a game about soft-peddling their failures. Each decision that the knight makes is meaningful to the story. Let it resonate -- let the mistakes haunt them and the correct choices sustain them.
Some players might be concerned that, say, the other players will not agree with their moral judgments -- that they will appear in front of their peers as too puritanical, too libertine, or just plain odd. This is a natural fear, but it is one that we must set aside for the creation of art, particularly collaborative art such as this role-playing game. You, the players and no one else, define the moral scale for Polaris. Did you disagree about, say, whether a knight leaving his lover to fight the siege constitutes an Experience Check? Great! No matter how it settles out, you've all learned something about each other -- you've revealed a bit of your morality, and in doing so you've become closer as people. If you don't think that's a good thing, stop reading right now, give away your copy of this book and play a different game, because you will not like Polaris at all. If you're still here, pay attention when I say it again:
Judge your characters.
It's for the best.

On Art and Polaris:
Amongst certain RPG circles -- the ones I move in, even -- people are admonished to "play with their friends," in other words, not to play with someone who you don't like out of the context of the game. This is sound advice. For the players of Polaris, though -- who are a special and different type, set apart from role-players and the populace at large -- I am going to raise the bar a little higher. Don't worry so much about playing with people you find it pleasant to be around. Play with people whose art you respect.
If you play with this you like to hang out with, you will like the game as a social activity. If you play it with those whose art you respect, you will respect the game as a work of art, and I think the game will touch you all the more for it.
But what if you play with friends, whose art you also respect? Ah, then, sir...
Then, the Mistake moves a little backwards.

If you're serious in pushing the boundaries on format and audience, then this kind of philosophical germs are a must. Imagine the artistical but inexperienced roleplayer and his reaction... the book should offer him stuff for later reading, after he's understood the rules and perhaps even taken the game for a spin. What better to deepen the involvement than some deep thought on the philosophy of the game? The length is good, too, don't go too long on one subject. Tuck this kind of stuff in the end, after a couple of art only pages, as an afterthought.

On the other hand, the game will read better and have more impact without them on the experienced player. He's looking for the rules and stuff, not philosophy. Like MLwM, with it's crisp and conscise style. Choose your audience.