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 What is Polaris? Polaris is a Roleplaying Game set in the far future where Humanity has totally hosed up the surface world and now lives under the sea. It came out earlier this year. It is published by the folks at Paizo, and developed by a French Company called Black Book Editions. I saw it at the Paizo booth at Gen Con this year, and a friend and I ended up demoing it. The setting was interesting enough that I dropped the money and bought it. I haven't read through all the rules yet (months later), but I figured maybe if I put up a Trad Game thread, and if enough folks show interest, then maybe I would read the rules more, and maybe even run a PBP game. To play you need the Two Core rulebooks. That is right, it is so volumous they have two rulebooks. The official site is right here. If you instead would like to give it a go and use some of the pre-made characters, a quick-stat guide is free from Drivethrurpg. What is the Setting? The game world is rather grim dark, giving some of 40k a run for the money. Life is hard, piracy is rampant, and most of humanity is sterile. Depending on where you are from, as a sterile person you could be treated like royalty, sold as property, or even entered into a government breeding program where you're jacked up with chemicals to increase your fertility/birthrate at the expense of a shorter life. This also doesn't factor in the fact that the surface is totally unlivable. The only things up there are some totally automated factories and a couple of space ship launching platforms. The atmosphere is toxic. If you can somehow survive it, the creatures up there will kill you. From swarms of insects that will shred you to the bone to killer trees, it makes a Death World look like a Vacation Spot. The surface is a massive shithole. Living undergorund ain't much better. There is a hostile race of sentient creatures called Burrowers, who well, burrow, and mess everything up. Look, the game is about being underwater, so they didn't really fluff up the surface or the underground. So yes, in this setting, you play someone who is sterile stuck in a station or a sub trying to eek out existence. Assuming you're not a mutant. Oh yeah, you can be a merman-like abomination that people hate, but you can swim underwater without a diving suit. Which is important since the game goes into detail about diving depths as well as time to acclimate to pressure. It gets very science heavy at times. What about the crunch stuff? Character Creation So character creation is a point buy system where you use points to purchase your attributes, your prior years of experience, and advantages and disadvantages. The character creation system is very reminiscent of what little Shadowrun and Conspiracy X i have played; down to disadvantages giving you more points to spend on advantages, attributes, or experience. Attributes are much like any other game, they are your base physical abilities. Where your skills come into play is your years of experience. Depending on how many years you have, you work your way through various careers that determine what skills you have and how much you get paid. These are everything from bartenders and longshoremen up to surgeons and commandos. Basically you get so many points per year to spend on skills, and depending on your current profession that year, you can spend points cheaper. Most professions require you to have so many years in prior ones to switch to them. For example, the assassin requires at least three years as a bounty hunter, spy, merc, soldier, or thief. Other professions, such as a Military officer require either education from your background, or 12-15 years experience in other military careers. Thankfully, if you don't want to do all of that, the book comes with 16 pre-generated characters with a wide range of skills and flavors. The skill test: Okay, so Polaris primarily uses the D20 for skill tests, but not in the way you think. A skill test is the product of your base attribute for the skill plus your mastery (ranks). Let us say you're looking at athletics. Athletics is governed by two physical attributes, Strength and Coordination. So first you need to figure out your base level. First you need to figure out your Natural Ability for strength and coordination. This works similar to attribute mods from Dungeons and Dragons. The book has a chart. an 8-9 is a 0 in the Natural Ability for that stat. It then goes up and down from there. So say you have a 10 in Strength, and a 16 in Coordination. According to the chart in the book that gives you a 1 and a 3 respectively, so your Base skill level for athletics in this example is 4. Did that confuse you? It confused me just writing it. So then you would add to that base level skill mastery ranks you put in there so say you got seven ranks during creation, your total skill level is 11. Once you have the number figured out, the skill test from there is easy. Say the GM tells you you need to test Athletics for something, and your skill level is 11. Then you roll a D20, and if you roll equal to or below your number, you succeed. In sum, the bigger your number, the better. Now there are difficulty modifiers as well, but that is the basic skill test. Things do get a little more complex in figuring out degrees of success or failure. These can have positive impacts, such as impacting how quickly you succeed on the your test. Combat and Damage Coming soon!(?) The Polaris Effect The Polaris Effect is this game's version of magic powers. The character creation says you should usually not let players use this stuff unless an advanced group, so I have yet to read it. In my short skimming of it, you can basically release the Polaris Effect with no test to try and master it; if you fail, you get to roll on a lovely table similar to the 40k FFG Perils of the Warp Table. So if you want to be a wizard who dicks over his team mates, they have you covered. Equipment and Gear Also coming soon. What Now? Well, I could probably go on, but first I thought I would gauge interest before I spend hours and hours going into detail on the game. My goals are to at least Combat, equipment, and the Polaris effect sections and update above. Second post below is reserved more for fluff related stuff.
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Dec 12, 2016 05:24
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 00:45 |
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Reserved
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Dec 12, 2016 05:24
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I will try to beat you to it and post a sample character tonight so folks can see what they look like. When you look at the pre-generated characters it looks simple, but a lot of math goes under the hood for the skills, as demonstrated above. The rule book goes as far as telling you to only to the math for skills you have trained, since there are a lot of them.
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Dec 12, 2016 15:45
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