# Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North *Created:* 2024-12-08, *Modified:* 2026-10-07 ![[Polaris - Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North (cover).jpg|600]] **Polaris** is a collaborative-storytelling game that wears the armour of a role-playing game — a GM-less, near-diceless tragedy in which the last knights of a fallen city go down heroically against an inevitable doom. There are no character sheets to exploit and no dice to push, just a liturgy of key phrases and the long, certain wreck of everything the protagonists love. It's a game to play with people you trust, the way you'd trust someone with a match near dry wood. Not because it's dangerous — because it's sad. ## Setting The book opens in the voice of memory: *"Once upon a time, as far north as north can go, there lived the greatest people that this world will ever know."* Atop the world stood the city of **Polaris**, built of ice and starlight, home to a people who danced with the stars and had not yet learned to measure time, for they had not yet learned fear. Its king was the wise and beloved **Polaris**; his queen, the **Snow Queen**, the treasure of the city; and her guardians, an order of **Knights**, sworn to her and singing their war-songs to each other like the tides. Then came the **Mistake** — a festering wound at the center of the world, its origin half-forgotten legend, that belches forth demons and damns the future. The people scattered into four **remnant cities**, and every Spring another demonic host pours from the Mistake. The worst of the demons are not the hulking things of **blood and flesh** but the insidious ones of **heart and soul**, who slip into the fortresses and whisper temptations into a knight's own mind. The player characters are the knights of the **Order of the Stars**, sworn to crusade against the Mistaken. They are brave, elegant, and doomed — the book is honest from its first page that this is a tragedy, a snowflake melting beneath a demonic sun. Your task is not to win, for in this story there is no winning; it is to go under with grace, and to choose, again and again, how. ## Mechanics Polaris's brilliance is how little machinery it needs. Conflict is **negotiated entirely through a fixed set of key phrases**, and the only die in the game appears when a knight chooses to stake a challenge that ends a conflict outright. The structure — not a system — carries the tragedy. ### Roles Each protagonist (a knight) is shepherded by four **guides**, one per player, who rotate as attention moves between protagonists: - The **Heart** guides the knight himself — his actions, health, and status — and plays aggressively, driving the story forward. - The **Mistaken** guides the demons and the environment: all the difficulty, temptation, and adversarial weight of the fiction. - The **Full Moon** guides the knight's social and hierarchical secondary characters (fellow knights, senators, officers) and referees conflicts. - The **New Moon** guides the personal and emotional secondary characters (lovers, close friends) and co-referees. ### The Cosmos Each knight's record sheet is dominated by the **Cosmos**, a circular diagram of who guides whom. The Heart's name sits at the center — the Mistake lies exactly beneath it — and the three surrounding sections hold the people, demons, places, and ideas each guide is responsible for. The Heart maintains it, moving names between sections to mark shifts in the knight's relationships. It is at once a relationship map and a literal map of the world, with the four remnant cities arrayed around the Mistake at its heart. ### Values Each knight has three **Values**, rated one to five: - **Ice** — the strength of the knight's bond to the world and society about him. It starts at 1 and rises. - **Light** — the knight's internal strength and prowess. It starts at 1 and rises. - **Zeal** — a sense of purpose and connection to the stars. It starts at a hopeful 4 and only falls. A knight with Zeal is a **Novice**, bright and burning. The moment Zeal empties, it is gone for good and replaced by **Weariness** — despair at the impossibility of the struggle — and a knight with Weariness is a **Veteran**. Weariness only ever climbs, to a hard ceiling of 4, where Zeal once added to challenge rolls, Weariness now subtracts. ### Themes and Aspects Beyond the values, each knight is built from four **Themes** — **Offices, Fate, Blessings, and Ability** — each a list of **Aspects**: the knight's social roles, the people and events of his destiny, the gifts of the stars, and his own lore and talents. Every protagonist opens with a few fixed Aspects — **Knight of the Order of the Stars**, a **Starlight Sword**, **Lore of Demons**, plus a shared Fate the group agrees on — and each game personalizes the rest. In conflict, *exhausting* a Theme buys leverage; it stays spent until Experience refreshes it. ### Conflict When a statement is challenged, the two active players negotiate using the **eight key conflict phrases**: `BUT ONLY IF…` (I'll accept it, on one condition), `AND FURTHERMORE…` (yes — and also), `YOU ASK FAR TOO MUCH` (pull it back to something lesser or different), `IT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE` (I'll deny yours, even at cost to my own claim), `THAT WAS HOW IT HAPPENED` (I accept), and the scene-enders. The two Moons referee the fairness of it all, and almost anything can be won, lost, or traded — an Aspect, a name in the Cosmos — except the absolutes: no one may touch the Values, and the Mistake may never be wholly repealed nor resolved. The cruelest rule of all is that a knight only becomes allowed to die once she is a Veteran, and only the Heart may offer it. The game's single roll appears when someone gambles on **IT SHALL NOT COME TO PASS**. The Moons fix a **challenge value** from Ice or Light (whichever the last Theme called for), and the knight's Zeal (or Weariness) tilts it for or against the side that dared. Roll the die; if the result is at or under the value, the knight triumphs and the conflict ends; if it runs over, the demons win — and the defeated knight must then check **Experience**. ### Experience and the tragic ending **Experience** is the engine of the fall. Whenever a knight is tested, the Heart rolls: an *advance* raises a Value and drains a point of Zeal, while a *refresh* restores spent Themes. The arc is a slow, deliberate slide from hopeful Novice to weary Veteran. When a Veteran's Weariness reaches 4 and another advance lands, the knight finally gives in, turns against the people, and **becomes a demon** — leaving play as a protagonist, but returning to the fiction as an antagonist, shepherded thereafter by the very player who once fought beside her. The dead are mourned. The fallen are something worse, and the game asks you to sit with that. ## Editions - **Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North — Star Light Star Bright Edition, Version 1.0 (2009)** — *In the library.* Polaris first appeared in **2005** (taking the Indie RPG Award for Innovation and Game of the Year the same year) from **These Are Our Games**; this is the Star Light Star Bright edition, dated 2005–2009 in its colophon, and the text the PDF and print both carry. The PDF is identical to the print except for omitting the back-advertisements for long out-of-print RPGs. - **The Wish We Wish to Night (2014)** — Lehman's expansion, its own note: **[[Polaris - The Wish We Wish to Night]]**. - **Cult of the Sun** — Chris Sakkas's two-page expansion, its own note: **[[Polaris - Cult of the Sun]]**. ## References - [Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North — itch.io](https://p-h-lee.itch.io/polaris) - [Polaris (2005 role-playing game) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_(2005_role-playing_game)) - [Official Polaris site (tao-games.com)](http://www.tao-games.com/hello-world/) - [Polaris: The Wish We Wish To Night — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/155727/polaris-the-wish-we-wish-to-night)