That was how it happened

Playing Polaris alone at the edge of the world

On playing the 2005 TTRPG Polaris, or rather- reading Polaris with the kind of active engagement that turns reading into play. A story about the kinds of imagining that can stem from an unplayed game book over long periods of time, and about how formative experiences can settle into memory and shape us long after we consider them gone.

Polaris was the first tabletop game I ever took home.

I was 19, maybe 20. At the time, I was playing in an ongoing second edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign that my housemate hosted in our junk-furnished (though artfully arranged) backyard. The story we were telling was slow, almost petulant in places– a melancholic, twisting thing about the slow draining of magic from a world caught up in opulence and politicking.

Our words were matched in affect by the physical setting for our play; us seated on velvet couches that we’d scavenged from the alley on a bulk-pickup day and lit by a sea of Christmas lights, each spliced together from the living sections of dead strands that were guaranteed to give you an electric shock if you brushed into them. This house backed up to train tracks, and the train itself would go by every hour, forcing us to pause for five minutes of horn and roar. As it passed, we would throw our heads back and howl. We rolled dice on a cracked stained glass window, propped up on cinderblocks to form a coffee table. I played a rogue.

I set this scene to underscore that we were being somewhat underserved by the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, even as we attempted to push and pull the system of the (relatively) open second edition from stat checks and areas of effect into a game that was conversational, generous, and vast.

Throughout this year, I was more than a little afraid of the local game store. I would poke my head in and browse the shelves every once in a while, but my bravery faltered well before buying anything, much less staying for a game night. I was visibly out of place, or at least felt it. And game books were expensive besides– I made do with borrowing my housemate’s Monster Manual and Player’s Guide, reading through them and daydreaming of stories I might someday tell, if I were to host my own table.

At this time, I didn’t know what an indie game was. But I knew all about zines, was even making them myself– experimental, messy art school projects I printed after hours on my work’s office printer. So when, on one ill-at-ease browse through the local game store, I saw a rack of zine-format books, I stopped browsing. These were smaller, self-published, messy, and critically– cheap. I picked Polaris on the cover illustration alone, paid my $12, and took it home.

Polaris is a game of Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North. It begins, before the text of the game itself, with this dedication in the forematter;

“There is nothing left.
There are no artifacts.
There are no stories.
There is no history,
not even in secret.
There are most especially no games.”

The table of contents is for all intents and purposes a poem. The introduction is a short story. It sets a scene in a city at the top of the world, where once an architecture of ice sparkled in an endless night. It describes the king, his queen, and her knights in their age of splendor. It tells of the horror and beauty of Dawn– a frenzied, obsessive melting from a new sun. It describes the shattered city, reconfigured into citadels. And it talks about the coming of demons who live in smoke at the center of the world, these beasts summoned by the great Mistake that still haunts the knights. Finally, it tell you about your battles to come– against the Mistaken demons, against your people, and against yourself– and the eventual failure that is your only future. Polaris is, above all else, a tragedy.

I buried myself in it, read the book straight through, just– blazing. Despite teenage years spent free-form roleplaying on forums, I’d never seen anything like it in print. You could play games with no GM? Phrases could be used as effective resolution mechanics? Lighting a candle was a way to begin sessions? This was allowed?

And, as if written just for me– at the end of the book, 10 pages straight of star names. Listed there for you pick among, when you are asked to name yourself.

Polaris is a conversational game for exactly four people. Players each draw up protagonists (as Polaris calls player characters), who are defined by their themes (recurring events, objects, and relationships), their values (their inner worlds), and their cosmos (their outer worlds).

Protagonists also have four guides; the Heart (who holds control of the character), the Full Moon (who holds control of the hierarchical social world around the character), the New Moon (who holds control of the intimate social world), and the Mistaken (who holds control of conflict).

Critically, these guiding roles are taken on by different players for each protagonist. With exactly four people at the game table, each will serve in every role once. The practical effect of this is that Polaris is a conflict and society-rich game, even with no game master. The emotional effect of it is that no character is ever fully within one’s own grasp– they are constantly being tugged one way or another by obligation, conviction, love, fear, greed, or anger. The protagonists are palimpsests as much as they are individuals, and playing them is dizzying.

Finally, Protagonists have three statistics; Ice (relationship to world), Light (conviction in self), and Zeal and/or Weariness (sense or lack of purpose). This is all mapped out on a character sheet that is tri-folded, and made to mirror the shape of the city itself.

Play in Polaris is primarily governed by key phrases, a series of set intonations that begin, end, or pivot scenes. These are specific sentences that have the power to add or remove things from play, begin or end conflict, or oppose or adopt other statements. In play, they become almost invocation-like, magical, with a weight and a substance to them that holds the kind of power a chorus in a song might embody, as it– upon repeating– builds meaning around it.

I knew my own tabletop group wouldn’t be talked into playing. Polaris was too experimental, too strange, and in truth– too sincere. So, alone in my bedroom, behind a closed door– I played by myself.

I drew up my protagonists and assigned them aspects of my own personality as their guides; one character might have my optimistic Heart and my fatalistic Mistaken; another my nihilistic Full Moon and my peaceful New Moon. I gave them their Themes, Values, and Blessings, sketched their relationships to one another, and then, sitting alone on the floor of my bedroom, I lit a candle and said the phrase that marks the start of play;

“Long Ago, The people were dying at the end of the world.”

I played Polaris for three nights straight on my bedroom floor, narrating a burning, desperate story of star-doomed love between knights at the end of days. I built a city of diamond battlements and iridescent solariums, imagined wild beasts trained to snap and snarl at friend and foe alike, described secret plots amongst the orchestra to transcribe the Mistaken army’s music, and told of the Snow Queen’s terrible wrath as she stalked the mausoleums, hunting spies. In this place of beauty and horror, I built my knights their society, their entanglements, their conviction– switching from protagonist to protagonist, muttering out their stories, now Heart, there Full Moon, here Mistaken, then New. My knights loved one another, and they were doomed for it.

Three nights straight I went to bed dreaming about fur in teeth and blood on ice caps. Night four, my reverie was interrupted by an overdue school assignment, night five by a power outage, and night six by D&D night itself. I put the book back on the pile, telling myself that my knights were close to their end regardless, and that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to see them flame out in the snow.

And then I proceeded to not play– or read– Polaris again for 14 years.

My Dungeons and Dragons campaign exploded soon after in breakups and social drama (as they so often do), and after a clumsy foray into a college friend’s Pathfinder game I stopped playing tabletop games altogether. Polaris would rise in my mind sometimes, when I was rearranging the bookshelf, or when I packed it in a milk crate for one of its many moves– but I didn’t have anyone to play games with at all, much less ones that asked this kind of investment and bravery. Still. Polaris sat on my shelf. For five years it was the only game I owned, in a section all alone. I stuck it between “comics” and “poetry”.

Eventually, it gained company as I returned to field, both playing and designing games. As I continued to study arts and theater movements like Fluxus, or the performance and instruction arts of the 60s and 70s, these histories melded with my own experiences roleplaying into a type of conversational, sliding play that felt like it informed my public-facing work in computational poetry, browser games, and other rule-based experiments that took their weight from language. By this point I was no longer reading games for fun just to imagine the stories I might make with them. The days of browsing the Monster Manual simply to turn ideas over in my mind were long gone, and I was in campaigns again besides, as well as a run of one and two-shot experiments and my own endless playtests.

And so– until last summer– I left Polaris be.

It took a casual mention from the tabletop designer Caro Asercion to bring it back to mind. They said something like “Hey uhh I just read Polaris? Is Polaris really good actually?” to which I replied something like “OH MY GOD I’VE BEEN WANTING TO PLAY THIS GAME FOR SO LONG WE SHOULD PLAY.” We got a group together, made a discord DM, and set some dates.

Those dates coincided with a work trip for me, where I was to be away from home for almost six weeks (a first in many years). I needed to pack light and had planned to play from a PDF, but on the way out the door the book caught my eye from the shelf and I tucked it into my laptop case. One more move for an old friend.

Our group never played. Dates got pushed, then dropped– life got in the way, as it will. In truth, I was thankful when the apology message came in the group chat. I was already reeling from a summer spent so profoundly in the world.

The night we had originally slated for the game I ended up on a northern finger of the Faroe Islands, on a three-day stopover on a ferry. I told myself I needed to hole up and finish some work before my rapidly rising deadlines subsumed me, and that an inn at the far edge of the world would be as good a place as any to do it.

I underestimated quite how far and quite how beautiful. The Faroes are a group of 18 islands made from balsatic lava left over from the opening of the Atlantic ocean 60 million years ago. Just shy of the arctic circle, they are hundreds of miles from the next nearest land. The islands are craggy and rocky, all sharp cliffs descending directly into the sea hundreds of feet below. Boreal grasslands dominate the hills, with isolated pockets of heather in more protected valleys. The gulf stream mediates the temperature from frigid into merely cold, but the wind is almost constant. With no natural predators, sheep graze every hillside. There are no forests.

I found my way up to the village of Gjógv, which is named for the natural gorge that forms a step-well down to the ocean. The room in my inn didn’t have internet. I had one paper book with me. And it was here, in the eternal day of the northern summer solstice, that I reread Polaris.

Polaris’s mechanics feel clunky in places now, with GMless games a genre that have been smoothed and refined by the interceding years. 19 years is a long time for a logic to emerge from experimentation and get hammered into standard operating procedure, and the edges here are both raw and oddly crunchy, a funny mix of phrase-based storytelling and stat tracking that works in some places and falters or flounders in others.

It also has a setting that is not exactly grappling with its inbuilt ideas of a perfect society existing at a northern apex of the world and beset by hordes of demons. The book cites 19th century romantic literature– Lord Dunsany– as direct influence (as well as the more obvious Camelot), and those both come with baggage that I was not fully unpacking at age 19, from ideas of civility and savagery to the rigidity of class-based societies and even some of the (ever-present) Gender.

But all in all– it was a book as strange and brave and burning as I had remembered. Spinning, tragic stories. Weird, almost spell-like mechanics. And an ornate frame with which to hold them.

And I did something that I hadn’t done in well over a decade– I played Polaris by myself. In the 3 am sunlight, pink and strange, I filled out Protagonist Sheets, assigned them their Hearts and Full Moons, picked names from the stars (none of which I could see in the actual sky above me with its eternal dawn).

I wrote about Gienah, the spear knight, bound to service, holder of the left wing archive, a gambler in all things, a devotee of chance.

Then Deneb, matriarch, courtly and courting, straight backed, broad, she names her litany of fallen loves before every meal.

And Procyon, the dog tamer, first to rise, his clean appearance bellies messy quarters where the bed is slept in less than anyone would guess.

Finally Spica, painter of still lives, trained with daggers, composed, quick-motioned, second in devotion to the cause only by Algol himself.

I built a gentler story this time, but no less tragic for it. These were characters with soft, old hurts; knights frozen in themselves, once rigid in their dedication, just now thawing into a brief and temporary blooming (snowmelt watered wildflowers) and then melting further into slumped, desperate shapes. It was a story of subsumed passion and swallowed joy, of a chestnut-blight rot that eats the heart before the shell. It was a story where the knights would falter before their city falls. Where conviction would choke them. I set them in motion against one another and myself, mumbling their stories, painting the stars, feeling the cold.

I played for hours. By the last scene, the phrases that serve as core rules were entrenched enough that I went on a walk, leaving my paper notes behind. I climbed the hill above the village, up and up along a promontory that mirrored the walk of my Knights along the towers and battlements. It was steeper and further than it looked, steps worn into the sod by human feet. As I climbed, my breath became more and more labored and my narration became more intermittent and internal, until I was finally just coughing out the key phrases between pivots: “And so it was…”, “But only if…”, “You ask far too much”, “And that was how it happened.”

I was near the end now, my Weary Knights fading into the softness of a long-waylaid polar dawn. In the face of a burning sun, with nothing left to guard in their own hearts, they laid down their weapons and then their bodies, which were also weapons. Their warmth formed brief hollows in the soon-to-be-vanished snow.

And as the sun rose again from the surface of the sea for a 3 am sunrise, I ended the game as it is always ended, saying the one phrase with which you can end a story of Polaris;

… but all that happened long ago, and now there are none who remember it.

Note: I wrote this essay in the winter of 2023, and first published it on (the waning days of) Cohost as a kind of farewell.