[The Pool] Spring festival (first time)

[ragnar]

This was our first time ever playing The Pool. Most of the players are long time role-players, though we have little experience with Forge games, though we've done a lot of freeform role playing. We usually only ever play in december as I live in Norway and they live in Iceland, and I'm usually only there for a few weeks in december each year. Which also means we tend to spend a quite bit of game time catching up.

The group consisted of Stone, Axel, Maggi and me as the GM. I had decided that the setting, style and everything would be decided by the group once we got together. I did write up a few NPCs, a bad guy and his motivations and some elements I wanted to include. My plan was to start the session in a nice happy place and introduce a character (or perhaps an object) that the characters would care about, and then have the bad guy taking it away from them. I was hoping I could use an NPC from one of the characters background story, but it didn't turn out that way.

We decided to go with the Titan world from the Fighting Fantasy books, as we had played lots of games in that world in the past and all the players were familiar with the style and universe. We then decided on a small fishing village where the adventure would take place. I tried to get the players to create characters that were somehow connected, but didn't have any success with it. I also tried getting some info from them on what kind of game they wanted, but with no luck on that either. My fault or theirs?

Axel created a local farm boy that had some kind of mystical powers. He behaved a bit like a mystic or messiah of some kind, and the other locals disliked him.
Stone created a traveling entertainer magician, that was from an upper class family but decided to strike out on his own.
Maggi created a gray shadow mage, that had spent some time in the demon realm. His character was dark and brooding, and was very hard to get involved in the adventure.

The adventure started at a spring festival where Stone and a group of Gypsies entertained. Here the beautiful daughter of the local lord gets introduced, as suggested by Axel. Stone dances with her and becomes very interested in her. Maggi somehow remains aloof and outside of all of this. I tried have some locals chat with him, but he reacted kind of hostile to them.
The morning after when Stone is going for tea with the lords daughter he finds the lord knocked out on the floor of his mansion and his daughter gone. Axel comes in to help, and all of a sudden Maggi pops up out of the shadows. They find hints that demons were involved in the kidnapping and Maggi uses his shadow powers and demon connections to help track it. Eventually they find she's being kept in a ship of the coast. Maggi drags Stone with him through the shadow realm to where the ship is, and they manage to rescue the lords daughter. A demon comes after them and there is a final showdown in the lords mansion. Axel gets a successful roll on attacking the demon and narrates using his mystic hidden dragon crouching tiger like powers to jump on to the demons back, tear of one of its horns and stabbing it in the eye.

---

A few points. The players nagged a bit about only getting 50 words to describe their characters, they wanted more.

Secondly, I think how narrow or wide traits were a bit confusing to some of the players. The tendency was to make them too narrow, almost like a skill list. They were also a bit unfamiliar with traits like "grew up in an upper class family" and how they could use that kind of traits.

I kept thinking of plots and what motives the bad guy had and so on, wanting to be clever during play. Then half way through the game I realized that I didn't need to worry about it. For one thing, I might come up with a brilliant plot which could be completely subverted by any of the players with one monolog of victory. And anyway things would work out by themselves with the help of the players. It was more important to play in the now, rather than worry too much about the bigger image.

The dice gambling worked fine and added some excitement.
The players loved the monolog of victory, and I enjoyed getting the input as a GM.
I missed a bit not having more control over the difficulty of tasks, besides the 1-3 dice I could hand out. Slaying the demon was no more difficult than beating some drunk in a bar brawl.
I also missed a bit more detail in the system, for instance about how to handle multiple characters with shared goals and more. The Forge was a lot of help her though. :-)

All in all the session turned out okay. Started out a bit slow, but once things got moving it was fun. Feedback welcome.

  Ragnar

[Roger]

Would it be possible for you to post the specific traits the players took?  Thanks.


Cheers,
Roger

[ragnar]

I only have one of the characters at hand, but his traits were.

Mage. +3
Entertainer (with magic) +1
Weapons training +1  (in the story he says sword and bow were his favorite)
Need for money - wants to be a self made man.
Likes to be clean and nice (not snob, but close).

Note that in the description of the character he goes into greater detail about what exactly his magic powers were, creating small elemental servants, illussion and shapeshifting.

Ragnar

[Roger]

Interesting; thanks.  Were there any Monologues of Victory that were especially memorable?


Cheers,
Roger

[Chris Peterson]

Mage. +3

Was Mage +3 worthwhile? That's an expensive trait! I read that Ron Edwards doesn't think its worthwhile to buy traits more than +1 (or was it +2?), so I'm curious how a +3 trait plays out..?

[ragnar]

I would have to ask the player about that, though I don't think he ever failed using his magic in the session. So, maybe it was worth it.

As for interesting MOV. There were a couple that stood a bit out. For one, when Axel slew the demon with a single roll my reaction was to stop him (from too much playing more conventional games), but I managed to keep my mouth shut and let him have his monolog of victory. He jumped on the back of the demon and tore the horn of the demon, which he then proceeded to stab deep into the demons eye. To me it felt a bit anti-climatic. Then again, it was late and about time to end the session anyway. :-)

Another MOV that was kind of interesting was when Stone was trying to make an impression on the villagers with his magic show. Rather than baffle them with light and magic, he created an illusion of a monkey that went among the audience. And then had the monkeys mother show up, a 10' gorilla, looking for her child. At first scaring the audience, but then calling the monkeys back, so the audience could feel like "hehe...I wasn't scared, I knew those things were just illusions...right."  To end it all with hundreds of monkeys running out of the tent in the background and jumping into everyones laps, creating total chaos.

Ragnar