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.
We finished our game of the Pool set in an alternate magical/fantasy Napoleonic era India/Afghanistan. We played 18 sessions. The final confrontation saw Brigadier General Jean-Jacqyes d’Espoir defy his superior (Lord Lumley, Albion’s Governor General of their Mountain Kingdom colony; also the husband of Espoir’s unrequited love interest) and attack Shah Durani, a diabolist and…
This game of The Pool began with the peace conference as presented at Galactic peace Pool, in which the player-characters were various aliens conceived by the players: the Avix, the Murkcap, and the Hive. That was four sessions. We decided to continue playing by focusing on each of those alien species to see what happened…
Jon made the mistake of musing online about playing The Pool with a Sin City, To Live and Die in L.A., Haven: City of Violence way, and like two predators spotting the straggler, Sam and I struck. Jon’s introductory sheet is attached, and so are our starting characters, created after reading it. As you’ll see…
So you can consider this a follow-up to my earlier post describing nuances in and action gaming with the Pool. I had the chance to try out my ideas with a couple of excellent players. The backdrop to the game was a “Demon Hunter” idea, set in contemporary times in my home city of Seattle. I…
Over the last few weeks, Jon, Sean and I have been playing a game of the Pool in a fantasy setting initially slapped together using a single picture as inspiration (I think this is one of Ron's techniques, and I played in a game that Ross started this way years ago). This week's intended game…
I have had a fairly interesting 2 months introducing a whole lot of people to playing rpgs. This is hopefully going to be a pretty small post, focusing on some of my thoughts on the process of teaching/learning rpgs (I’m writing this at 3 am, forgive me if its a little messy). I’m going to…
So I had the chance to play the Pool with a couple of excellent roleplayers this past weekend, and it helped spark some thoughts for me. Let me describe a particular moment from the game, and then how I applied a lesson from it to a wider context. At one point, an NPC was trying…
Our game of The Pool continues, following the events of the great galactic peace meeting as seen in Galactic peace Pool. Here’s what we decided to do: to play each of the three established player-characters back at his, her, or its home-world, afterwards. In each case, the other players will make up new characters for…