Post by Anna Landin in Systems You Wish Got Hacked More Often/At All

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I know of at least one person who has a hack of The Quiet Year in progress! It's not out anywhere yet, but I've seen a draft - it's about building a cosmology, rather than a ground-level community, which I thought was a neat way to branch off of that.

Personally, I think my pick would be:

- Polaris: the way it structures the flow of play, and how players divide the control of characters between each other, is really interesting, and seeing the same kind of structure taken into different genres and in different directions would be neat. I know of one hack where the viewpoint was reversed, so that rather than playing a chivalric Knight, you played as the Mistaken, the threatening force, but I'm sure more could be done with it.

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Samantha Day5 years ago(+1)

Wow, that hack sounds incredibly like my shit! If this mystery individual would like playtesters at some point in the mystery future... dot dot dot.

I just bought and am reading through Polaris now, and first of all, I want to play the heck out of this--I know I've watched like the first hour of a stream of it, but it was a million years ago--and am wondering what a hack could look like. I'm thinking "outer space!" but that's always my first thought.

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Anna Landin5 years ago(+1)

Well, hopefully Mystery Individual #1 keeps working on that hack!

and gosh, reading Polaris *instantly* made me made me want to play it. I haven't had the opportunity yet, but I've kept my eyes on other people playing it, and am definitely conspiring to get around to it myself some day. And there are SO many directions you could take a hack in - swapping the setting for a different doomed community, swapping the Knights for some other group, even throwing out the doom and tragedy altogether and just keep the way Polaris handles authorship and control of characters and how they relate to each other, or simply the pattern of key-phrases and responses.

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Sweevie5 years ago(+1)

Yeah, Summer Job from Off the Table is doing this hack where you play the Mistaken as the protagonists, right?

So this reframes it to be about losing apathy/disdain and growing attached at the same time as you grow in power to fight the Knights of Polaris. It's got mechanical adjustments to reflect this shift in perspective. I'm very interested to seeing it play it out, it's not going to be any less tragic, though.
But yeah, I love the conflict negotiation system and I've been wanting to get to play it, as well. But also, a game that I feel I would want to feel really comfortable with all the players around the table.

Also, hi, I'm that mystery individual XD ... I'm currently wrestling with what terms to settle on and how I can use them to convey a working abstraction of creating a cosmology without making sweeping generalizations. And how to do that in a way that is still well graspable as a game text.

The main underlying difference (on a game level) is that it will have three perspectives you take on instead of two. So, next to the perspective of the players (who want to introduce interesting content/conflict/questions) and the perspective of the forces/deities/entities/impulses that are active in the cosmos you draw, you will also take the perspective of non-descript folks of that faith/worldview that have opinions, takes and interpretations on the cosmology they follow.

Once I've solved the above to a sufficient degree, this will definitely need playtesting and already before that I also need to figure out how and where I need consultation. Because the topic as a whole touches on many sensitivities that I might only be able to guess at, in the best of cases.

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silentferrets5 years ago

I would love to do or play Polaris hacks. The progression is so good. The core mechanics are so good.

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