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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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 – Dying in The Pool
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 […]
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Role-playing culture and presentation
It’s been a very full six months for reconnecting to the physical and social activities here in Norrköping. Getting to GothCon turned out to be too demanding, but otherwise, I participated in various ways at Närcon (spring), Lincon, a service/play event for Ukrainian kids, Närcon (summer), Augustifesten, and just now, Kulturnatten. Only some of it […]
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“Here and Now”: A Flashback
While reading the Annotated Sorcerer rulebook this evening, I came across the phrase “here and now” again: the default “setting” for Sorcerer. And I had a sudden flashback. It is the summer of 1998, and I am GMing an ongoing GURPS game for some close friends and a rotating cast of friends-of-friends who want to […]
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Investigation Based Traits
I've recently started my first game of The Pool with a few friends in a tabletop Discord. The setting we all decided on was very mystery focused, with a supernatural influence in the background, and source of many colourful descriptions from people I've described the game to. One of my players made a detective kind of character, and […]
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Dungeon Crawling with the Pool
So I wanted to try a dungeon crawl with the Pool, for a couple of reasons. One is that in general, I want to see how simple a rules system you can get to “do the job”, in a satisfying way; another is I just wanted to play around with the Pool and see what […]
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More sin, more city
We’re six sessions into the game first described in Bad doings in Bulwark, set in the fictional city of that name, continuing with the misadventures of (1) gangster widow and former cult member Gratitude and (2) and shaky, increasingly shady white-collar schnook Willy. Their troubles lie in the rising political star of one Amos Zag. […]