Welcome to the Polaris Campaign. This is a multi-GM campaign based on the Champions Superhero Role-Playing game, published by Hero Games. Started in the late 80’s, the campaign has been running on and off for over 15 years.

What is a multi-GM campaign, good question. In a multi-GM campaign, any player in the campaign is welcome to take the big chair and run his own adventures within the confines of the campaign. All GM materials become available to the players once they have been used in play and can be used by other GMs. With the campaigns global scope, games can take place in any area of the world, and certain GMs often stake out their own city where the majority of their adventures take place, but no one is bound by those restrictions. The only real limits are that; your adventure should do nothing which would significantly change the course of the campaign as a whole and your own PCs may not appear in adventures which you run.

The number of players and GMs has varied dramatically over the years, sometimes with different local campaigns running in parallel. In order to maintain a certain amount of structure, the campaign has a few positions which are filled by the senior GMs currently active in the game. These positions are; Editor-in-Chief and Continuity Editor. In addition, there is a GMs council led by the senior GMs that all GMs may participate in.

The Editor-in-Chief steers the overall path of the campaign. He or she may approve or initiate plot-lines which could result in wide-sweeping changes in the course of the campaign as a whole. Adventures which may change the larger campaign landscape should first be approved by the Editor-in-Chief before they are run. Adventures which change things on a more local or less significant extent may be run without consulting the EiC.

The Continuity Editor is responsible for keeping track of what is going on across the whole campaign. Adventures are only considered official if they have been properly documented and submitted to the Continuity Editor (after they have been run). The Continuity Editor also tries to maintain all of the characters which appear in the campaign. This information is kept safe and made available to any GM or player upon request (Maintaining this web-site, for instance, is a function of the Continuity Editor). Another duty of the Continuity Editor is to reconcile adventures or characters who are inconsistent with the campaign as a whole. This may mean removing the adventure or character from the continuity or, more commonly, editing it so that everything fits together nicely. Any such changes affect the history of the campaign as a whole, not the individual characters who participated, unless they choose to absorb those changes into their character.

The GMs Council is an oversite group which provides for the greater continuity and management of the campaign. They have the power to override the Editors on any decision which they feel weakens or threatens the campaign. They are also responsible for maintaining and updating the “Hacker’s Guide to Polaris,” our house rules, and resolving any rules disputes which may arise and adding those decisions to the Hacker’s Guide. GMs are the final judge on rules disputes during play, though they are encouraged to give strong weight to any advice a senior GM may provide. The GM Council will only become involved if an unclear rule needs to be addressed and updated outside of play. Currently, we have two senior GMs active in the Campaign. Senior GMs include Stirling Newberry (our founder), Bradley Potts (that’s me), Paul Wilson, D. Todd McCall, and Daniel Marsh. Todd and I are actively running adventures.

That brings us to the Hacker’s Guide to Polaris. In the last 15 years, champions has seen many revisions of the rules. Many of these changes have been incorporated into the Polaris rules set, but others have not. In addition, the GM Council has developed alternative rules under which the campaign runs. The result is that Polaris runs under the Champions 3^rd edition rules with additions from 3e and 4e as well as house rules. The document containing these rules is “The Hacker’s Guide to Polaris.” These rules are in a state of constant revision and are free to any Polaris player, however, players are also required to own an official Hero System Champions rule book.

The Hacker’s Guide to Polaris contains the house rules. Polaris is basically a 3^rd Edition Champions Campaign with added rules from 4^th and 5^th edition Champions. The Hackers Guide spells out these rules as well as any unique House Rules in use in the campaign. Access to this section of the website is restricted to active participants in the campaign and requires a secure logon.