The conventions and events of the summer have interfered with my tidy editing and posting habits, but we have indeed continued playing Dark Sun with The Pool, as first discussed in Dark + Sun + Pool. I’m finally getting around to presenting the recordings here. This link goes straight into session 2 in the same playlist that I started there. As of this writing, we’ve played six sessions total, and I’ll continue to add them as I complete the editing. [now complete; sessions 1-6 are all in the playlist]

Thoughts

• Session 2: Finishing the fight with the belgoi, using a two-hit procedure for dangerous foes. The second half is a good example of a whole group, me included, feeling out what we are playing and and how.
• Session 3: I had prepared a lot of material located in Nibenay, but it felt so abrupt that I thought more about the journey there … and upon reviewing the textual content, I finally hit upon a more social and emotional context for what Ashathra was doing. I was able to think of situation rather than setting and scenes. You can also see everyone processing how the new words on character sheets provide real content. Also, the Ancient Device Thing is, if you can’t tell immediately, lifted outright from the Hand and Eye of Kwll from The Knight of the Swords.
• Session 4: Arriving in Nibenay, and a foray into elven crime … I’m glad we didn’t jump right into the city earlier, because a lot of the content in this session would not have been playable without a lot of lead time. The time spent at the gentry estate in session 3 really nailed a lot down for me, so I was able to play the Hill District in this session as if it were a real place I’d lived in myself.
• Session 5: All right, this was utter madness grounded in perfectly reasonable decisions made with incomplete information, not to mention one crucial substance-related mishap. There’s also a GM misplay or at least failure to deliver my preparation properly, not due to strategizing, but merely confusing myself: the preparation pitted Sharukh against Bliin (Athashra’s supporter who’d been arrested), but I played it as Sharukh against Axvhol … which actually doesn’t fail to make sense, but I think you can see the point during play when I realized it.
• Session 6: All the violence when no one’s plan at the arena goes anywhere but south. I suggest asking yourself, upon finishing session 5, “who will die,” and then viewing. The answer is definitely not “nobody.” It’s not easy to see coming but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.

At the end of session 6, I was inclined to say, well, we’ve come to an ending, and it’s good enough to stop … but you know, there’s a lot of play to address. A certain player-character (who will be obvious at the end of session 6) is full of hopes and dreams; there are tons of NPCs to take over as player-characters, as well as a whole crazy city to create new ones from.

So I believe we shall continue!