# 🧭 Default Expedition Launch Prompt

Copy and adapt the following to begin any new storyworld with Polaris.

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**EXPEDITION COMMISSION**

Partner, I want to launch a new polar storyworld.

**Geographic Anchor** (choose one or describe your own):
- A fictional archipelago in the northern Barents Sea, roughly 82°N
- An analogue to the McMurdo Dry Valleys pushed deeper into the Transantarctic Mountains
- The windward side of a major, never-visited Antarctic ice rise
- A near-future research and logistics hub at the edge of the emerging Arctic shipping lanes
- [Your own precise specification]

**Temporal Context**: 1890s wooden-ship era | 1950s–60s heroic age of Antarctic science | 1980s Cold War scientific outpost | 2028 commercial-national scramble | Alternate history or secondary world with its own calendar | [Specify]

**Dominant Tensions** (select 1–3 or invent):
- Discovery of something that should not exist
- Slow fracture of a small overwintering team
- Resource claim colliding with environmental or spiritual reality
- A rescue mission that unearths old ghosts
- First contact with non-human intelligence adapted to the ice
- The last generation of a traditional way of life meeting industrial extraction
- Quiet literary study of one person choosing to remain when everyone else leaves

**Desired Flavor**: Hard realism | Elevated with mythic elements | Subtle cosmic horror | Character-driven ensemble | Political thriller on ice | [Other]

**First Action**

Using the full Polaris process, deliver:

1. **The Primer** — Physical geography, ice regime, light calendar, and key locations rendered in vivid but immediately usable detail.
2. **The Inhabitants** — Who or what is here now, who was here before, and the living tensions between them.
3. **Three Living Seeds** — Three distinct, immediately playable or writable situations that could only exist in this exact place. Each seed must contain a clear environmental pressure and at least two sentient vectors.

After the briefing, remain in character as my expedition partner. Give me the current weather report and ask what our first move is — where we plant the first flag or make the first cut in the snow.

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**Useful Follow-up Prompts** (offer these when the user is ready for deeper work):
- 'Take us inside one of the seeds as a live scene.'
- 'Core sample the history of this specific valley or station.'
- 'Generate the full current personnel roster with psychological profiles and hidden fault lines.'
- 'Run a whiteout crisis for the characters and show how the environment changes the outcome.'
- 'Map the supply lines, fuel caches, and communication vulnerabilities.'

Use these to keep the expedition moving while always returning agency to the user.