-or- Walk A Mile In My (magical, city-conquering) Shoes
-or- Following In Your Father's (magical, city-conquering) Footsteps
-or- Dominic abandons the counter of Gamma Ray Games and come plays Polaris with us. Yay! No one tell Eric!

players: Dominic, Noah, Anders, Ben

Avior (Dominic) -- Avior is haunted by visions of a glorious, cleansing matyr-dom. Why is everyone so afraid he'll follow his visions? What is the high oracle hiding from him? Why is his daughter afraid of him after seeing her own visions him? Why is his only companion in the wide wastes the guy he hates? (feeling's mutually buddy!)

Carina (Noah) -- Magical shoes come with a terrible price. Carina's dad wore them too long, went crazy, got locked in an ice tesseract by his brother. Despite the warnings of her uncle (the same one who imprisoned her father), a reclusive hermit craftsman, and a fairly sensible demon, Carina seems determined to wear the big shoes and follow in her father's footsteps.

I liked the wrinkle of the other city having forgotten the ways of the knights and being shocked to see Avior's starlight sword. "Oh no worries, our demonic magic will keep us safe from the demons." Nice one, Noah. That played in perfectly to the surprising revelation that Carina never had a sword, just a badge. (I keep picturing her shouting "Stop! Starlight police!")

I totally missed a bet and should have conflicted to have Avior let his daughter sacrifice herself in his place instead of cutting her down. As it was the conflict ended before he died and fulfilled his vision. I mean sure, he afflicted the People with the burning tyranny of an endless sun, but omelette / eggs, etc (Anders, thanks for the "and now the sun will never go down" idea at the end. That was perfect). I also meant to tie in the "proto starlight sword" thread from Carina's story and have it be the "pedestal" holding up the sun that Dominic described Avior seeing in his vision.

Dominic: "Well if we kept playing I would totally fly into space and destroy the sun. I'm a knight." Win! That's someone who's getting the hang of Polaris.

Thanks for the write-up. I get the impression this is the most chore-like aspect of these meetups, but reading the summaries can be a pleasure; I'm overdue to type stuff up.

The session itself was by no means a failure, but I did feel for the first time that I personally 'failed' at the game. In the first scene where I acted as Antagonist to Carina, I did a poor job of picking up on the cues from Noah about what he was interested in for his character, and I think was kind of oblivious to the fact that I was pushing the story somewhere he wasn't happy with. After I realized that this seemed to be going on, I tried to sort of backtrack, which maybe was a bad move; in any case, we never established a solid rapport. A large part of the problem may have been the fact that, feeling like we weren't on the same page story-wise, I was hesitant to be 'truly' confrontational, which in retrospect was no service for the protagonist/antagonist relationship. I'm curious: does anybody have tricks to telegraph intent, or feel out other folks' desires when you can't read well right off the bat?

None of which is to say I didn't enjoy the session — I did, and it was a small comfort to see that my personal slow-motion crash&burn didn't come close to ruining the game. Actually, the slightly painful experience makes me that much more eager to play Polaris again, hopefully with more success.

Anders, smart observations all around, though I think you did a much better job than you think you did.

That's actually one of the things I really like about Polaris: it shows you in no unclear terms whether you are succeeding in getting on the same page. When you don't click, you know it. It really hones your antagonist-protagonist skills.