Adept Play
Adept Play
Tag: The Pool
The Pool is a content-customizable game by James V. West, composed of several sequential versions, first presented in 2002, published by his company Random Order Creations.
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A Few Sessions Later in the Shadow of the Shining Lords
General Catch-up and Oh Wow We’re a Party Now The game described in this post has made it through to the fifth two-hour session, playing about once a month or so. One of the four players mentioned above never ended up showing up for the next couple games, and when I came to an understanding…
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Hands-on content
I’ll lay this out the way I see it and have tried to present it over the past few years. I think the role of textual setting content is clear: it explicitly drives into playing situations, or it doesn’t. (So-called “scenario seeds” typically don’t.) However, one simply cannot tell by reading. Sometimes it seems overly…
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Inspiration Discussion
For the last few years the topic of inspiration has increasingly become both noticeable by me and important to me. I wanted to talk about it with others. Jon and Claudio wanted to as well, so we recorded it. Note: we focus here on inspiration as the necessary first step that launches into preparation and…
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Hot passions, hot place
Sorry, not those sorts of passions, or at least not much, as we’ve been playing. We’re continuing with my more-or-less faithful extraction of the AD&D 2nd edition Dark Sun, plus a bit of 4E, using The Pool, as described in Dark + Sun + Pool and It always goes to the arena. The six sessions…
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It always goes to the arena
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…
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More Mustering Out Blues
“Mustering Out Blues” is an homage to classic Traveller I made by hacking the Pool, James V. West’s decades-old rules system (today we’d call it a “game engine,” I suppose). I’ve run a bunch of one-shots with it, but today I ran the second session of a campaign game, and I don’t want to brag…
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In the Shadow of the Shining Lords
Checking in to share some notes about an ongoing game of The Pool which I started with a few local friends (though we play it over Discord) after taking Ron’s “Playing the Pool” course. I started out by offering the players a few evocative images from the covers of the Planet Stories pulp magazine, and…
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Dark + Sun + Pool
I am merely typical in dreaming about play in the world of the Dark Sun, as presented as an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition product in 1991. I am aware that it’s been developed by who-knows-who in God-knows-what media, and that all sorts of fandom wikis and whatnot have bloomed in the internet since…
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Alien parasites vs. prom night
I recently ran The Pool on short notice for three players, using a ‘start file’ I created as part of Ron’s course, Playing with The Pool. The players Carl and Kevin are old friends of mine and in their 50s like me; Russel is Carl’s 19-year old son, who joined our regular (much larger) roleplaying…