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.
Yes, the title is clickbait. It’s merely a pun on the game we’re talking about … or does this topic turn out to address the loaded role-playing hobby term after all? You decide. Jon and I took some time to share experiences about playing The Pool, based on the games you can read about or…
We’re playing The Pool, with me, Hans, and Christoffer. The setting I’ve offered comes from my presentation materials at Kulturnatten a couple of months ago, using Dust Devils at the time. I was born in San Diego, and although our family soon moved to the Monterey Peninsula, I’ve sought to understand the history of that…
Into another game of The Pool, this time with Jerry, Renee, and Helma. I’ve been prepared for this one for a long time, with a lot of accumulated images. You’ll spot the particular sort of pop science fiction right away: tons of implausible aliens as stand-ins for human concerns or outlooks, a completely transparent political…
This is the single most brutal post I have presented or perhaps ever will present at Adept Play. So I’ll start with all the good things. The fictional adventure as atmosphere and topic was delightful. I offered a starting point which instantly became, from and for everyone, absolutely our own mostly-anthropomorphic frog fantasy. Lorenzo rightly…
The exchange between me and Ron about stakes setting has been on my mind, and perhaps because of that I have been extra attentive to the presence or absence of setting explicit intentions and stakes in my current play. I’ve been playing a game of the Pool with two players (George, from my Legendary Lives game,…
I am playing one of the best games in my life right now. It is a game of the Pool, with influences from the mumblegore genre (Pop Skull, Creep, Baghead, House of the Devil). The characters are communists and drug addicts who are all vaguely connected through friends and a local epidemic of demonically multiplied…
So I read Ron’s work talking about and analyzing the Pool, and the game itself seemed to me to be elegantly and brilliantly designed, with a kind of simplicity I find really appealing. But I never had a chance to try it, so I was thrilled when some kind people were willing to play online.…