Has anyone wrote up an introductory summary of the Polaris setting - say, 500-1000 words or so?
I'll be playing the game next week, and would like something like that to give them something like that (or use as crib notes).

Hi Darren.

I want you to open your book and look at the first page after the table of contents.  It's labelled Moments Frozen From the Flow of Time.

There it is.

yrs--
--Ben

I've looked at that, and while it's evocative, it wouldn't do anything for me as a player had I not already read the setting chapter. (In fact, it didn't do anything for me when I first read the book.)
I was hoping for more condensation of things like coming of the Sun, and the Mistake, etc. Information.

Hope that last post didn't come over as too curt!
When I said, "it didn't do anything for me when I first read the book," I menat that it didn't give me the kind of detailed information I wanted - the kind of information the setting chapter does contain.
It looks like I'm going to be doing it myself - boiling down the salient points into a page or two handout for my players, to give them ahead of time. And in the process, sadly stripping it of its poetic majesty. But tragedy is the name of the game after all :)

Darren, I'm going to be a little harsh here.  I hope that you take this in the manner it is intended, which is to help you play the game better.

What you seem to be looking for is a canon.  This is problematic, because Polaris as it stands right now does not contain canon, outside of the passage I referred you to.  You could make a canon out of the other texts, but my hunch is that doing so will make your play suck something fierce.

In short:  All that introductory material is intended strictly as a spur to play and is in no way to be taken as a restriction on play.  Condensing it into a list of bullet points effectively removes any inspiration value it might have had, and at the same time sets it up as a series of inviolate limits to play as it stands.  Further, because you wrote it, it sets you up as "the guy who knows the setting" to whom other players must bend.  This is explicitly against the rules of the game.  The Mistaken has guidance over the setting, not you.  Even if, especially if, the Mistaken in question has not read the book.

I have this feeling, given the way that you're talking about "my players" that you are usually the GM for the group.  My strong advice is that you arrest that shit right now.  Do not write your own setting material.  Do not condense anything for the group.  Rather, before play starts, have someone else (not you) read "Moments" out loud to the group and, if the group has patience for it, also "The Mistake."  (the part with "maybe this happened, maybe this happened.")

Then play.  You, and you explicitly, should never talk about the book, and try to enthusiastically support other players' contributions to the setting of the game.

(If, at the end of the first session, you feel like you don't have a strong grasp on the setting, have an out-of-game discussion about what you want to see in the game's setting.  Don't refer explicitly to the book during the discussion.  I have a feeling you won't need to do this.)

yrs--
--Ben

Hey Ben,

I humbly disagree with you here. There is the automatic aspects (Knight Stellar, Starlight Sword) and the veteran rule (Solaris Knight, Frost Maiden). And the Remnants, the Mistake, and the day-night-cycle are pretty much prerequisite to play. So, there is a canon apart from the Moments Frozen from the Flow of Time.

I really do think that the Moments alone are not enough setting information to start play. The six scenes I have played so far have confirmed that to me.

- Frank

Frank wrote:
I humbly disagree with you here. There is the automatic aspects (Knight Stellar, Starlight Sword) and the veteran rule (Solaris Knight, Frost Maiden). And the Remnants, the Mistake, and the day-night-cycle are pretty much prerequisite to play. So, there is a canon apart from the Moments Frozen from the Flow of Time.

I really do think that the Moments alone are not enough setting information to start play. The six scenes I have played so far have confirmed that to me.

We don't use the day-night cycle; the Remnants play a very sketchy role at best. I did give a short rundown of the setting material to the players that had not read the book (only one of them, I think), something along the lines of: "Well, there was a great city, but somehow it has been almost completely destroyed and there's a smoking whole at the exact north pole, the Mistake. There are raging demons all around, trying to kill the last of the people, and someday they'll succeed. We'll play knights trying to prevent that from happening, and all of our characters will either die or become demons ourselves, so we're personally as doomed as the people as a whole." I don't think this hurt anyone's willingness to wildly improvise during play, but then again, two of my co-players are used to playing indie-games with me and the third is a girl who's only ever played one session of InSpectres before - so there are no "this guy knows the setting" habits around.

I would read aloud the section on the Polaris Knight and the Frost Maiden once someone becomes veteran, though. Simply because it is so beautiful. The last sentence makes me shiver every time I read it.

My attempt to distill this exchange to its essence:

Darren: Ben, you're bending that spoon without touching it! How can you possibly make it do all those strange and wonderful things? In order to replicate your feat, I must have more detailed data on the material composition of this spoon!
Ben: There is no spoon.

I strongly agree with Victor.
For me the important thing in Polaris is to get the feeling. All the setting details may be really skipped. Indeed, there are some details about the Calendar that I don't like, and I will surely skip. No problem. I agree that the setting is really beautifull, and reading it you get more and more into the mood. But that's the only important thing to play. We may create the details as needed. There are isolated ice castles hanging in cliffs like you cannot dream in my Polaris setting, and who cares if in your setting the remnants are smaller or bigger, or the only surviving cities. We will build a Polaris world while playing.

The Frozen momments and a general description like the one Victor presents should be enough to grab the interest and the feeling of the game.

Cheers,
Arturo

Sydney wrote:
My attempt to distill this exchange to its essence:

Darren: Ben, you're bending that spoon without touching it! How can you possibly make it do all those strange and wonderful things? In order to replicate your feat, I must have more detailed data on the material composition of this spoon!
Ben: There is no spoon.

So there are people who can pull off a game of Polaris with only the Moments Frozen from the Flow of Time as reference regarding fictional content? Wow. That’s pretty… intimidating.

- Frank

Frank wrote:
So there are people who can pull off a game of Polaris with only the Moments Frozen from the Flow of Time as reference regarding fictional content? Wow. That’s pretty… intimidating.

Oops, my bad. You specifically said "regarding fictional content."

Hi,

It's also worthwhile to note that many of the things people would normally associate with setting details, are kept in the appendices as examples and extra material- not as part of the core of the book.

Chris

Ben wrote:
(If, at the end of the first session, you feel like you don't have a strong grasp on the setting, have an out-of-game discussion about what you want to see in the game's setting.  Don't refer explicitly to the book during the discussion.  I have a feeling you won't need to do this.)

I'm with Brand, probably obviously, but it's not even as stark as that.
I mentioned playing Polaris to my players. Immediately, I recieved a barrage of questions - "What's the game about? What do the protagonists do? What is the world like? What is the game about? Where do the people live? What are the people like? What do they look like? Who do they fight?" And more.

All these questions are answered in the setting chapter. And they are answered so well, it would be a shame to be the only one aware of that stuff.
My group's approach to game fiction is to use what we like, mangle what we want, so there's little danger of that vision forcing us into too narrow a route. The stuff in the setting chapter is still plenty vague with lots of ways to use it as a springboard.

If that danger is there, though, why is that Setting chapter even in the book? Ben, you thought it was worthwhile for someone to read, and I think it's worthwhile for all players to get the gist of it, and get an opportunity to read it in full when they can.

Go ahead and make them read it. It's only 20 tiny pages.

- Frank

I would do, but I can't ask them to do that at the start of the session we are designing characters and starting play - there are five of them (some of whom are veeeerrrryyyy slow readers). Thus, the idea of work out a handout to give them ahead of time. (If I had five copies of the book, it would be no problem, or a spare copy I was happy to chop up and photocopy!)

The handout I've now done is mostly typing verbatim some key passages from that chapter, which is a good compromise of information v. keeping much of the poetic language.

The important thing to remember about Polaris is that its the color and flavor that's important not the specific details.  These are a lost people, forlorn and without hope.  Most are so lost as to not even realize their own doom.  Some however remember that there once was a time when the city and people were perfect.  Not figuratively...but literally...perfect...Like Garden of Eden before the fall perfect.  Like Platonic ideal perfect...like rapture beyond comprehension perfect.  And now...not perfect.  Capture that sense of loss and longing and it pretty much doesn't matter what setting details you come up with.

For some you can capture that essense from the moments frozen in time passages.  For others it might take a little more.

The moments didn't really do it for me.  They were too fragmented to have any impactful meaning.  NOW having read the rest of the book those moments are poignant.  But with no other context, they just kind of hung there for me.

The part that did it for me was the depiction of the people so mesmerized by the sun that they spend the entire day observing it without eating, drinking, speaking or...singing.  When the science portion of my mind realized that that far above the arctic circle day lasts for like 6 months at a time...the degree to which the people have been trapped by the glory of the sun really hit me.  6 months...entranced like a moth to a flame...damn...that's pretty "not perfect".

Whatever it takes to get that sense across to the players is essential to having Polaris work.  A dry list of bulleted factoids won't do it, but I can certainly see why the frozen moments by themselves may not be sufficient to do it either.

Darren -- e-mail me at taogames@gmail.com  I'm making something for you right now.  I think you'll like it.

Everyone else:  I'm glad such vigorous discussion is going on.  Please continue, if you feel it's productive.

Brand: The setting text as it stands is designed specifically to try to ease "I'm-super-detailed" sorts into playing Polaris.  The thing is, and this is absolutely critical, that the setting text can't be taken as an unbreakable canon without destroying the game's system in a really painful way.  Now, if you read the 20 pages as they stand right now, that isn't a problem, because they are quite ambiguous and unreliable.  If you condense it to a set of bullet points, you suddenly have a reliable setting information which pretty much kills half of the Mistaken role and a big chunk of the game's play.

There's a ton of room for people who love setting details to revel in setting details.  But there isn't room for a canon.

Victor: That's pretty much what I do.  "Knights fight demons, fallen civilization, Mistake, a bit of Moments" and then let's go.  I'm impatient with prep.

Frank: It's not as bad as all that!  I wish we'd played while I visited, you could have seen how it goes.

In Polaris, setting is treated like a secondary character -- created and discarded as needed, and only important based on our shared investment as players.

yrs--
--Ben

Ben wrote:
Brand: The setting text as it stands is designed specifically to try to ease "I'm-super-detailed" sorts into playing Polaris.  The thing is, and this is absolutely critical, that the setting text can't be taken as an unbreakable canon without destroying the game's system in a really painful way.  Now, if you read the 20 pages as they stand right now, that isn't a problem, because they are quite ambiguous and unreliable.  If you condense it to a set of bullet points, you suddenly have a reliable setting information which pretty much kills half of the Mistaken role and a big chunk of the game's play.