[Ptolus] Erik Mona Blogs Final Ptolus Session

[Henry]

It's like watching Sean K. Reynolds leaving, all over again.

Hopefully, whatever Monte is doing for new projects, it'll still be Genre stuff, instead of like, "travelougues of the Greek countryside," or something.

 

[eris404]

Is Monte going to start up a new gaming group when he gets to Milwaukee? 'Cause...it ain't that far from Chicago....

 

[Eridanis]

Thanks for sharing, Erik. Nice to have a satisfactory conclusion, isn't it?

 

[Gold Roger]

Sound like on great ending for no less than three combined campaigns. This looks like such a fun battle.

It's like watching Sean K. Reynolds leaving, all over again.

Geez, when did that happen? I didn't even know that

 

[sckeener]

When not adventuring, Barbatos anonymously publishes a scandalous broadsheet called the Midtown Partisan. To help spread the news of some adventuring seminars Sue's character Benris wanted to sponsor at the party's magic shop, I sketched out the following sample front page of a typical Partisan issue.

The Midtown Partisan shall be my prefered broadsheet. I shall accept no others. I believe everything they say. It is gospel.

 

[sckeener]

I do have a question about the great game. How fast did the turns go? I mean with 100 minis with 13 characters in play, what tips or tricks did y'all use to speed up the game?

 

[Erik Mona]

Did you get any sort of epilogue then or was the big fight the end to the campaign?

The fight pretty much ended the campaign. I made a point to go on a high note, with Barbatos standing on the center of the theater's stage, looking out at all of the carnage we had caused. With an exhaultant smile he said, "To me, my Cobbled Man. Let us make for Castle Barbatos." And that was pretty much it.

After the battle, Monte briefly summarized the effects of Menon Balacazar and Kevris Killraven's deaths. The Pactlords of the Quaan (a group of nonhumanoid slavers to which Killraven belonged) were pretty much decimated and were no longer a force in the city. Our old buddy Linech tried to fill in the gap, but didn't last long. Our victory finally convinced the Commissar that maybe they could clamp down on crime and evil and make the city a better place to live, thus validating Zophas's main point of contention with Ptolus since the day he arrived there.

Monte then went around the table and asked us what we would like our characters to do. The Brothers Lorenci set sail across the sea to lands unknown, reaching (and then penetrating) a wall in the world to discover the homeland of Benris's titan ancestors. I think Benris went along with them, as well as one of Michele's characters. Alyia, I think. I seem to remember Callista signing on with Zophas (to a limit) in his fight to be proactive against evil. Yay. Callista is a great character. I am getting sort of sad just thinking about this, but it is a good kind of sad.

Anyway, I can't really remember the fates of all the characters. Major campaign revelations were dropping every ten seconds or so, and we were jumping forward years at a time so that Monte could reveal how certain long-term plots panned out.

Barbatos decided to "go public" as publisher and editor of the Midtown Partisan in a blow-by-self-aggrandizing-blow account of the events at the theater, pushing to make the Partisan a major journalistic enterprise through which Barbatos could start to influence public opinion in a major way.

Then there was a question and answer session in which Monte revealed what he had been planning to do with threads like Shilukar and the Perfect Ones and Nicodemus and a whole bunch of other things. I am positive that if the campaign had run its course it would have been absolutely wonderful, but it was already that so I can't complain.

--Erik

 

[Erik Mona]

Thanks for sharing, Erik. Nice to have a satisfactory conclusion, isn't it?

Yeah, it was great. The end of the first campaign was epic, but this was just perfect. Such an awesome touch to bring in all of the characters.

Just wonderful.

--Erik

 

[Erik Mona]

The Midtown Partisan shall be my prefered broadsheet. I shall accept no others. I believe everything they say. It is gospel.

Under the title every issue bears the legend: "Everything printed below guaranteed true."

Seriously. Check the book. Monte let me write a sample issue for publication as a player handout. Sue fleshed it out a bit to fill two pages, and she captured the style so well I can hardly remember which parts are whose.

--Erik

 

[Erik Mona]

I do have a question about the great game. How fast did the turns go? I mean with 100 minis with 13 characters in play, what tips or tricks did y'all use to speed up the game?

I have no idea how Monte accomplished the feat. Maybe some sort of voodoo magic or something. My guess? I'm thinking he had abbreviated "quickie" stat blocks for his guys and he had them go in groups he tracked on a seperate "behind the screen" initiative boards. I'm thinking the whole fight lasted about eight rounds. Maybe 10. I was counting on the same post-it that had the kill total, so I've got it in my notes somewhere.

So let's say 10 rounds. We played from 1:00 to 10:30, with maybe an hour break and another half-hour of pre-fight planning and exposition. That's eight and a half hours of fighting (with lots of roleplaying mixed in, of course). My rough calculation says that's about 51 minutes per round, but since all of us were playing multiple characters it didn't seem to take that long. Plus, these were major NPCs and very high-level characters, so what was happening was interesting and often took a lot of deliberation and double-checking the books.

--Erik