So my friend, his wife and I played The Pool for the first time in an Illuminati / Conspiracies everywhere setting. Anyway, it went very well, but I and Veronica (my wife's friend) failed a lot of our rolls and lost our pools several times during the session. The reason I believe this happened is that we had each had a couple of +2 traits instead of having 9 dice to start with in our pools. Anyway, I like the way it played this way because we saved our MOVs for times were we wanted to figure something out in the story, and we had to play to our characters in order to get dice back into our pools. Anyway, it occured to me that maybe a maximum gamble of 6 dice and perhaps cheaper costs for buying trait bonuses would promote this kind of play (like 1 for +1, 3 for +2, +6 for +3, 10 for +4, etc.) Any thoughts?

So here's how the adventure went down:

My character, JT and his partner Bill were called to investigate the dealings of Brian Jaxxo in Redmond, WA. He worked for a software company called Bilbosoft that has offices in NY and in Switzerland. My partner and JT found Brian in a stripped clean house, laying on the floor, pummeled and bruised all over his body. After extensive searching, my partner found a Palm Pilot that had one email in its sent email folder to Photo_bitch17@aol.com. After calling this into the FBJT analysts were able to have this email tracked down to a Marlys Jaxxo, Brian's sister, who lives on Capitol Hill.

JT left his partner and went to hunt down Marlys Jaxxo. After lying to her a little bit to see if she was somehow involved, saying that JT was her brother's old college friend, JT spilled the beans that he was actually a FBI agent and that they needed her to come identify a body that they thought was her brother's. Marlys (being Vro's character) of course brought her cameras with her and was distraught as we got caught in terrible 520 traffic (should have taken I-90!). Her brother's email was cryptic and used childhood references.

Eventually they make it back to the scene of the crime and the door was wide open. They entered and JT's partner and a couple of other Redmond police were dead. They had broken necks and bite marks on their bodies. All had expended their ammo against their assailants apparently to no effect. Brian's body was gone! JT called for backup and Marlys and JT left to track down the location that the email hinted at. This lead them to a park in South Seattle where we found a door at an adjacent warehouse that said "Bilbosoft" on it. Marlys noticed an international Masonic symbol on the door, also. JT called for back up and then proceeded to break into the warehouse that was protected by an advanced security system.

Inside they found a lot of computer equipment, a clean room, and a room that had a bizarre tentacle in a specimen tube that was dripping a strange fluid. In the clean room we found chairs that had computerized masks sitting on them. Marlys took pictures of everything. JT put one of the masks on. Instantly, he was transported to a 4 color comic book “matrix” virtual reality. He looked at himself and he was The Cosmic Surfer. A 30’ tall robot sentinel down the street clanked around the corner of the steet JT was on and said “Stop. Intruder.” JT shot the robot with my Cosmic Energy blasts and it fell to the ground. JT investigated the hulk of the robot and found a symbol that read “Cransa”. JT saw Jimmy Olsen walk by, and then Aunt May. JT stopped Aunt May and asked her who or what Cransa was and she said that “She’s the leader; the one who builds the robots.” Then Marlys turned the mask off and JT was transported back to reality. JT wanted Marlys to come in, to see if she recognized anybody in this 4-Color Matrix that might be an associate of her brother’s. She wanted to make sure that we would be able to get out of the matrix, so JT put the mask back on. Back in the virtual reality, JT saw a telephone booth, the likes of one that Clark Kent uses to change into Superman. JT went in there and picked up the receiver and was back out of the “Matrix”, of course! So Marlys and JT both put masks on and jacked into the comic book matrix. Marlys found her superhero self to be an Invisible Monk. The comic book dependents seemed to have a familiarity to her, as if she had been in the matrix before. While talking to some comic townsmen, they were attacked by three more sentinels. Cosmic Surfer flew on his surfboard between two of the sentinels and the sentinels blasted each other into rubble, but was then shot by the third and smashed into a building. JT woke in the real world, ripping his mask off with a splitting headache.

JT then got a call on his cell phone from his mysterious benefactor and was told not to trust the back up FBJT agents that were coming. So JT had Marlys help him pack up the tentacle specimen into the trunk of his car. He attempted calling back his mysterious benefactor to take the specimen and analyze it, but there was no answer. So Marlys offered up her studio downtown to temporarily hide the specimen.

Once at the studio, Marlys remembered that she had a friend of friend in the biotech industry that could do the analysis of the tentacle. So they took it to the doctor. The doctor was fascinated by the tentacle and asked where they got it. JT told him that they found it in the Puget Sound while diving. The doctor opened the jar and the tentacle attacked him knocking the doctor unconscious. Fearing the worst, JT shot the tentacle and it oozed the same fluid that from its wound that it was immersed in the jar with. JT wrestled the tentacle back into the specimen tube and Marlys called 911 for paramedics for her friend. Just then a man with ten other men in trench coats entered the room. The man said that the specimen belonged to him. JT told him that it belonged to an FBI investigation and asked who he was. The man answered that JT didn’t understand, that he was taking the specimen. Then the trench-coated men shuffled and shambled at JT and Marlys. Marlys took copious pictures while retreating. JT decided to toss the specimen out the second story window where it crashed and broke on the ground. JT jumped out after the tentacle which was flopping away towards the Puget Sound when he landed wrong and twisted his ankle.

Marlys grabbed JT and pulled him under the awning so that the trench coat leader could not shot at him from the window. Then the trench coats shuffled out the window and thumped onto the ground and went after the tentacle which had made its way to a storm drain and disappeared. Marlys and JT retreated back to JT’s car and sped out of there.

The NSA took over the investigation of the Bilbosoft warehouse and JT was debriefed but avoided any problems. Examination of the photos that Marlys took showed that the trench coat men had small metal boxes on the back of their heads and also that the matrix masks in the warehouse were attached to the specimen fluid. The leader of the trench coats turned out to be a man named Mark Anderson, one of Brian's work partners.

Another note about the adventure. When the characters went into the comic book matrix, the GM asked us to write a twenty word description of our super hero personas and assign 4 more dice to traits or to a separate "matrix" pool. In about a minute we had super hero characters. Totally simple.