Adept Play
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.
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Kulturnatten is a major event in Sweden, during which any and all activities conceivably identified as Kultur throw open their doors or set up stalls and bandstands, and everyone roams around checking out whatever they want. I participated last year both at Spelens Hus and at the game design event at the city library, as…
This is a downtown festival held in Norrköping every year, mostly associated with food but which has accumulated all sorts of other activities through the years. Now it’s almost a local extra version of the Sweden-wide Kulturnatt in late September. It’s also an important anniversary for me, in two ways. First, Spelens Hus began participating…
A couple of friends wanted to play the Pool, and picked a Lovecraftian scenario. So I updated my Cthulhu version of the Pool (available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xAJJUfMEksHb8TTC7pRdn_Hlh6fDyCbU/view?usp=drivesdk) and the players made one character each. They wanted a period piece, so we went with 1920s Seattle. The first thing I did in my prep was read about…
So, last time I played Trollbabe was almost exactly three years ago, and as documented by this post on La Locanda, it didn’t go too well. Some years of Adept Play courses and constantly playing The Pool later, and re-analyzing Trollbabe through that experience, and I felt very confident to pick up the game again…
There’s an adage in photography that goes “the best camera is the one you have on you.” I had a good experience recently where I could apply this adage to role-playing games. I was with some friends at a local board game pub and after playing a few rounds of a card game, someone asked…