Players: Evan, Nick, Seth and a new guy who's name I forgot...

Continuing my quest to distill exactly what is good about Polaris, I pitch the game again last week. We were playing in a Sci-Fi setting, where our mistake triggered an alien invasion.

Right off the bat, one of our heroes decided that terrorism was the answer, to make society confront its problems and change its ways. The other hero decided to straight up overthrow the government, because only he could see the true way forward. In the end, we fudged the rules a little to let the heroes go head-to-head in conflict resolution; they were dueling in their mechs while the city burned around them.

In general, I'm starting to think that sci-fi settings don't work so well with Polaris. It all comes down to the nature of the mistake. To me, the interesting part about Polaris is the blame; something happened, which is clearly our fault, and different elements of society accuse one another of triggering it. In sci-fi, Mistakes are either external (aliens), non-combat-able (a black hole is eating us), or have obvious solutions (why don't we just accept the trans-humans?). I think the Mistake works best when it is beyond our society's understanding.

We did a bunch of Polaris reskins back in the day. I find that it works best if you define the mistake much like you would a flaw in Downfall. We did Rome, and the mistake was tyranny, because even though we were supposed to be a Republic, and the guard was supposed to be protecting it, anyone could be tempted to think that hmm maybe things would run smoother if we had a tyrant…

Also, it's critical that *anyone* in the society could be mistaken, or become mistaken at any time.