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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Galactic peace Pool
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…
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Narration authority is where it’s AT
When it comes to my priorities as a roleplaying practitioner, the enthusiastic, zestful exercise of narration authority may be my #1. This is a bit surprising to me, because my ability to play has vastly improved over the last year by attending to other aspects of this activity. Over the past four months, it’s been…
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Frog Pool fantasy
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…
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Intent in The Pool
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,…
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Rules, Authorities, and PbtA
If you were following the development of Champions Now a while ago, you may remember the memorable game played at the Gauntlet which I adapted into the examples in the game text (Values and family, not necessarily family values). Pawel played Grimfire in that session, and a lot of his input found its way into…
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Breakthroughs in The Pool–Brooklyn + Mumblegore
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…
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Star Trek: The Pool
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.…
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Self-help hell at the eldritch well
First Lincon video! With none other than James V. West’s The Pool, which is a signature game for this whole website. It’s also a deliberate comparison with James’ other, related game, The Questing Beast, as I played and posted about at IndieCON. Briefly: The Pool works from the logic, “What is happening, so that we…
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Beasts, Pools, and plot emergence
It was a surprise to see The Questing Beast there at IndieCON, in Italian, as well as that anyone would hold it up and say, “Let’s play this” when we were surrounded by so many other acclaimed or recent titles, and that the anyone happened not to be me. Here’s my take on the session…