Thoughts on Reading Bill White's 2006 Ganakagok

I don’t remember where in my readings I first became aware of Ganakagok.  I found this copy, from the 2006 publication of the game, labeled as the “Second Edition”, on ebay for a reasonable price.  It has sat on my shelf for two years now, and something brought it to mind, so I pulled it out and gave it the read it deserves.  There is a more recent version of the game available as a PDF at Indie Press Revolution and all downloads are at ganakagok.com. I haven’t read the most recent version, so I don’t know what rules might have been changed, added, or removed.
 
As usual, let me preface my thoughts here by noting that I have not played the game, so take my thoughts for what they are worth.  I have read the book through twice and played it out in my head, but not everything works at the table the way it does in my head, and certain interactions between parts of the game might not occur to me.
 
The basic idea of the game is that you are exploring the fantastic lives of a handful of the inhabitants of Ganakagok in a time of change.  Ganakagok is a giant iceberg that has been wrought by some ancient force to have spires and caves and numerous mysteries.  The people who live on Ganakagok are called the Nitu and are a quasi-Inuit people.  Ganakagok and the Nitu have always existed in a permanent night under a sky of spinning stars.  But now dawn is coming, and players play to find out what will become of these specific characters, the Nitu people as a whole, and Ganakagok itself when the dawn arrives.
 
The main unique element in the game is a deck of custom-made tarot cards, which the game calls the Ganakagok Tarot.  It’s a 52-card deck made of 4 suits with 13 cards in each suit, just like a regular deck of playing cards.  The four suits are Tears, Flames, Storms, and Stars, and the cards run from 2 to 10, the face cards being the child, the man, the woman, and the Ancient.  Each card has the following information on it:
 

• It’s rank and suit (Two of Tears, Ancient of Stars, etc.)
• An easily recognizable graphic indicating its suit
• A few words summarizing the meaning of the suit
• A few words summarizing the meaning of the rank
• A title unique to that card, both in the fictitious Nitu language and in English (the Two of Tears, for example, is uktiukota kibaka – school of fish)
• A predominant illustration of the title
• A unique meaning of the card (“to court or become friends,” “to celebrate; to feel joy and express it without reservation,” etc.)

​The tarot is not a gimmick within the game. It is the main feature in just about every aspect of play, from character and world creation to scene setting to scene resolution.  All this information on the cards allows for a range of inspiration for and interpretations by the players. The information also guides the tone and theme of the game by constantly having the language, imagery, and mythological structures of the world before the players.  It’s not just a cool device; it is put to excellent use in the game.
 
Ganakagok is designed for short-term play.  To this end, White put in a pacing mechanic that ushers players through the stages of the game, though players are given some control over how quickly they move through those stages.  At the outset of the game, the GM lays out 4 cards from the tarot, each representing one of the 4 spiritual powers that rule the Nitu people’s world: The Stars, The Sun, The Ancient Ones, and the Ancestors.  The cards are kept face down before the players, but the GM uses the information on the card to determine the general length of the 4 stages of the game: Night, Twilight, Dawn, and Morning.  As players have their scenes, they can put points into the current stage, and when those points meet the threshold determined by those 4 opening cards, the game shifts to the next stage.  Before going on to the next stage, one of the 4 face down cards is revealed, and the player who revealed it, uses it to divine something about the role of the spirit in the great change that is happening.  In other words, we learn at that moment what the Stars want to happen, why the Ancient Ones build Ganakagok, what the sun intends to do—or whatever questions the players want answered at that time.  It’s a neat way to have the mystery about what is happening revealed slowly and organically, with each revelation potentially influencing the scenes and play that follow.  There is no pre-planning required, and that creative burden is spread among the players.  It’s a simple, neat, and effective system.  Finally, when Morning arrives, the game ends, and there are mechanics to determine the final fate of the players’ characters, the Nitu people, and Ganakagok itself.
 
Characters are tied directly into this big change.  Character creation begins with three cards from the deck, which players interpret to decide 1) how they know the great change is coming, 2) what they hope the great change will bring or prevent, and 3) what they fear the great change will prevent or usher in.  This is the starting point for learning who your character is, and everything else stems from it.  Those cards also tell you what “good medicine” and “bad medicine” your character begins play with.  Medicine can be spent at this point to build your character and the world.  Good medicine can give you important items, relationships, knowledge, and access to the spirits, while bad medicine gives you limitations, fears, troubled relationships, and sins that weigh on your soul.  By the end of character creation, you have your character positioned in relation to the oncoming change, to the other PCs, to the village you are all a part of, and to the landscape.  Additionally, a loose map has been constructed and a basic relationship web within the village are constructed through this process.  As play continues, the maps (physical and relationship) will be added to and changed.
 
I really like the character creation process.  Like a lot of Forge games of this period, Ganakagok relies on point systems to “buy” facts and details of the world and your character, which I have not traditionally been a fan of, but here the point system is both simple and meaningful.  Yeah, the same thing could be accomplished without points, but because the points tie into the cards and because there is a simple way to adjust those points while you build your character, I think it works well here.
 
So character creation positions your character and the world as it exists in the Night, the status quo before the world begins to change.  As play begins, 4 more tarot cards are flipped and interpreted to answer the questions “What is happening in Ganakagok right now?” and “What is happening in the village right now?”  This begins to upset the status quo and gives the players something immediate to respond to on their turns.  From that point on, scenes are meant to bring situations of change and choice as the normal relationships and routines are upset. Game play is turn-based, and during your turn, you let the GM know what your character is doing or wants to do, creating a quick sketch of a scene.  The GM then flips a card from the tarot deck and interprets it to create a situation that is designed to become untenable.  You play out the scene until you can identify what White calls the “fateful moment,” the decision or action whose outcome will have meaningful ramifications.  He’s careful to separate fateful moments from conflict.  Sometimes those two are the same thing, but to resolve a fateful moment is not to resolve the central conflict in the scene.
 
Resolving fateful moments is the most involved part of play as it involves cards, stats, dice, manipulation of those dice by spending points on your character sheet created by the good and bad medicine you spent earlier, and a process for determining narration rights.  It all hangs together, but the process is rather involved.  I like that all players can be involved in the process, not just the player whose character is involved in the fateful moment.  I also like that the event is resolved in two stages that lets the fateful moment arise, take steps toward a resolution, meet a whole bunch of influences to push the resolution toward individually desired outcomes, and then have a final resolution.  The staging of the process is cool, and if played well, it can lead to all kinds of cool narrative details that turn the fateful moment into a capital-E event.  But there is nothing to require that kind of connection between the points and fiction, so I imagine some play can devolve into point spending without the narrative build.  I can also see all the point-shifting that happens being a potentially annoying back and forth that detracts from the excitement rather than builds on it.
 
That whole back and forth relies on a somewhat adversarial relationship between the GM and the players, the players using their good medicine to help their own cause and the GM using their fiat points to create complications.  This is always a difficult line to walk because the GM is given no motivation other than being an adversary, creating complications for complications’ sake.  It requires a GM with a good sense of when and where to put pressure and when to say its enough.  The game provides its own limitations by dictating how many points the GM has to spend, but the randomness of it all means that the GM may have too many or not enough points at time, preventing a potentially powerful scene from reaching its promise or building up a scene that is better left alone.  Good and experienced players might never have a problem, but we can’t all be good and experienced all the time.  It’s unclear by the rulebook if the GM is supposed to go as hard as they can whenever they can, or if they are playing to some other purpose.  Clarifying that purpose (both in the rules and through the mechanics) would go a long way to alleviating this potential problem.
 
A scene resolves with a pool of points for one of the players to spend, which they can use to 1) improve their own character or their situation, 2) help out another character, 3) advance the stage clock toward entering the next stage, 4) shore up points for a positive or negative ending for the villagers, or 5) shore up positive or negative ending for Ganakagok.  Sometimes the player will have a lot of points to spend, and sometimes they many only have one point to spend.  This is the part of play it’s hardest for me to imagine in action, since those are a lot of choices with probably only a few points to go around.  On the one hand, I like that you have to chose between benefiting yourself now or your people in the long term, and I like that you can control whether the clock advances or now, letting you speed up or slow down the overall game.  On the other hand, that has to feel like a Sophie’s Choice sometimes which I imagine often leaves the player dissatisfied.  That means the tough decision is good, but the dissatisfied feeling is not.
 
The text itself is good.  There are a lot of visual aids and examples, which I appreciate.  The rules themselves, however, are difficult to follow as presented.  I read the book through twice not just to make sure I understood but to understand at all.  There are a lot of moving pieces and the way that a mechanic acts and interacts are not all explained in one place.  The good news is that they are all explained, and it all makes sense.  I didn’t end my second reading with any questions about how the game worked.  The only bad news is that it was work to get to that understanding.  I imagine that much of the most recent edition is about making the game easier to understand and grasp on an initial reading.
 
There’s a lot about the game that’s exciting and that I’m eager to see in play.  I’m especially excited to see the tarot cards in action and to go through character construction.