I said I'd write something up about the genesis of Borealis, and so here that is.

I'd never heard of Carta, or thought of the game at all, until I ran across a post on the solo roleplaying subreddit which mentioned the Carta Jam. So I had a quick read of the Carta SRD and I thought: this sounds interesting; the cards are your play field. You're in some way constructing the game as you play; a bit similar to a roguelike where your play space is generated anew every time. I flicked through a few of the existing games and some of them had extra props that you needed; some way to track stamina or life, or some other statistic, and I thought: I don't like that. You've got a deck of cards; it'd be more elegant, I reckon, if the cards were simultaneously the playing field and your inventory and scoreboard, so you don't need some other thing to do that. It's all self-contained. And just like that, the core concept arrived fully-formed in my head: deal out the cards face-down, move around turning them face up; red cards (the colour of blood) are challenges to be overcome; black cards are things you find to help you overcome challenges. There it was; the core mechanic.

The idea that “challenges” were not fights came about quite early. I'm a D&D chap by inclination, but I've been thinking recently about how a lot of games contain combat as the only source of trouble, and that combat involves killing another thing. Sometimes there's a time for that; I'm not giving up my D&D fights, they're fun, and it's good to not have to struggle with conflicting moralities and instead just wield your shiny sword to chop up a monster. But it's also good to not reflexively reach for fighting as the one and only challenge a character faces. The Carta setup rather assumes that you'll define a “meaning” for each card in the deck, and I'd already decided on the red/black split between bad things and good things. Red for blood might not be appropriate now, since challenges wouldn't be fights, but it still seemed reasonable, and I was a little uncomfortable with the "black = bad" symbolism when the choice between one and the other was arbitrary, so I stuck with the red. But now I needed some sort of a setting, a world, where there would be many challenges presented but they wouldn't all be monsters.

This took a bunch of thinking. Looking back at my notes, I'd narrowed it down to five or so ideas that I thought could sustain what I had in mind:

• a forest with natural features and monsters
• an internal vision quest journeying through your own mind, or someone else's
• the sea on a ship
• an archipelago like Earthsea
• the icy north - sent out to become worthy

and after a bunch of musing, the last one seemed most appropriate. What could be a more taxing environment than a windswept endless tundra of ice? And I already had a reason why you were there; you were sent out to prove your worth in some way. Surviving in the bitter teeth of winter would name you worthy. This particular theme comes from a few different sources; my main D&D campaign has an underlying thread of proving oneself to be worthy in it for one of the characters, and it's got threads in it of Mister Nutt's upbringing with Lady Margolotta in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals, a story beat that I found quite moving. And the challenge of the north came from three separate short stories, all in Dragon Magazine in the early 1990s.  The Ulfjarl’’s Stone, by Mickey Zucker Reichert, in Dragon #141; Storm Winter, by M. C. Sumner, in Dragon #163; and Uktena’s Crest, by Kit Wesler, in Dragon #175. The Ulfjarl's Stone is the most directly relevant, being the tale of a young son of the tribal chieftain who is sent out on the ice; but Storm Winter has the mystical edge I wanted, and Wesler's tale of Lynx Clawed Him has always been one of my favourites, of a young tribe member sent on a quest and returning with honour having graduated to adulthood, just as Anrad did when seeking the stone.

Since our hero is seeking adulthood, and I didn't want that to be by murdering one's way through a host of polar bears and ice tigers, this suggested the mystical edge to the quest; one of self-discovery, of confronting the devils inside yourself that gnaw at you to give up, to return home, to lie down here in the snow and drift off to a final sleep because it's all just too hard. And that in turn suggested the nature of the challenges: yawning crevasses, impassable ice shelves, and the endless cold. But there are only so many of those; maybe I'm being dismissive from my warm flat in the UK, but one impassable ice shelf seems much like another to me. So I decided to introduce threatening creatures again, but with the intention that the player would find creative ways around them that didn't involve death. On the other hand, it did occur to me that it's up to the player how they play the game; if they decide that their character is one who would walk with winter and leave a trail of blood behind, then that might be rather crass but who am I to gainsay them? So I decided to lean the game in the direction of avoidance of bloodshed with the declaration by the walker that they would “harm none” (inspired by Raistlin's unusually loud command upon entering Darken Wood), and by having the black card boons not be weapons. Instead they are mostly practical, or inspirational, or magical. The rope is inspired by Patrick Rothfuss’s games of D&D with his son where the son has a magical rope that obeys commands but not weapons and so the nature of the game inevitably changes to puzzles and kindness rather than murder. Some of the cards are designed to be prompts for story; sharp sight, a brief respite from storms, a strange but impressive shape of ice, a memory of your brother in a cloud. Some are explicitly supernatural, designed to indicate to players that that door is open to them; a sourceless light that leads to shelter like the star of Bethlehem; a warming ring; a sparkling flower; a multicoloured orb. And, sure, a couple are potentially weapons: the unmelting icicle or the jawbone that fits your hand. It's up to the player, how they choose to play, whether they choose to consider a tiger defeated because they snuck past it or hid from it or tricked it... or murdered it.

When I started writing the game up, I realised that the simple mechanics I had in mind were problematic, because they were too simple. I had in mind that a game of Borealis would be like a game of Klondike, the card solitaire game that everyone knows. Short and simple, although it did involve the dice at least. (People using the game as a writing journal exercise would obviously take longer!) But in practice, it was way too easy to get stranded. In the initial setup, when you hit a red card, you could boost your roll by turning already-discovered black cards back to face-down again. But then you of course would simply re-uncover them on the next round! Plus, I wanted people writing the story of the walker to have different writing prompts; discovering the icicle and then using it every time seemed uninteresting. Finally, there was nothing stopping your initial move to be on to a red card, at which point... your game was probably over. This wasn't fun. You need a chance to build up black cards. So the mechanics changed a bit; losing meant retreating (with a single black card penalty); sacrificing cards made them go away to be replaced with unknown cards so there was a risk to going back to them; sacrificing also potentially blocked a path you had opened; and you get two black cards for free at the start (your coat and your staff, provided by the village). This changed the game quite a bit, particularly the sacrifice mechanic, where now you were tasked with recording in your journal not just that you managed to make it across the icy river but how you lost your bird whistle or were inspired by the heat of a spring while doing so. Initially the win condition was also different; the score of uncovered cards you needed was much lower, because you might by sheer bad luck have dealt the initial 24 cards as all low numbers and so the game would be impossible to win. However, the sacrifice mechanic changed that; if the initial 24 card layout did contain a high number of low cards, you can deliberately choose to sacrifice a lot of them to boost a roll with the intention of replacing their slots in the layout with new (and hopefully higher-numbered) cards. This dramatically changed the play of the game, and much for the better.

Finally, I wanted to make the game document look nice. This is almost entirely done by having cool images of icy snowy terrains, pretty much all of which were taken from (and credited to) various Pixabay artists and photographers. The document itself was created in LibreOffice Writer, which is actually quite good at this stuff once you work out that you should tick the "Archive (PDF/A)" option when exporting a PDF to make it embed the fonts :-)

Anyway, I hope this gives some insight into the thought processes I went through when designing Borealis, both the gameplay side and the story side. If people have questions I'm happy to answer or talk about this further!