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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Kulturnatten 2023
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…
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Augustifesten 2023
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…
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A Game of the Pool, Lovecraft-style
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…
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Real-life trollbabes adventure on their own terms!
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…
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The best RPG is the one you have on you
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…
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Games & Systems: My Thoughts
I worked my way through both the post by (on) Liber Ludorum and the original post by Linda Codega, both of which I have linked. Codega’s post is on Gizmodo and by definition is more focused / influenced / to be read in as commentary on more commercial ventures. Whereas LL’s post moves further afield…
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Mustering Out Blues
At the end of February, I ran a game for Games on Demand Online I call Mustering Out Blues. It’s a Traveller hack that came from a couple-three different places: (1) the classic Traveller campaign I started at the height of the pandemic that evolved into Galactic Adventures, the game I described in a previous…
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Calling Rolls and “Unresolving” statements
So, while getting feedback for my “Poolpendium”, I have recently discovered that a specific way I play “The Pool” is not that common among other people as I had originally thought. When I’m GMing, I’ll sometimes give bad or undesirable outcomes to see if the player is willing to roll for it, sometimes reminding them…
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Last Breath
I ran this 3-session game of The Pool with some friends while taking the Adept Play course Playing with The Pool. It was everybody’s first time with this system. I’m going to talk about our experiences with The Pool, particularly the perceived death spiral, and how players used Monologues of Victory (MOVs). My start file…