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<blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 8996860" data-attributes="member: 11760"><p>So, I have used Ptolus since 2006. And it is a <em>brick</em>. At the time, it was the largest RPG book ever published and is almost certainly one of the biggest still today.</p><p></p><p>But even in the city, I don't know what each building is or who lives there, and there are whole neighborhoods that are pretty lightly sketched. In the Dungeon beneath the city, points of interest are detailed, but there's a lot of blank space. And outside the city, there is only the lowest level of detail. Whole countries get less than five sentences of information. (It's not Harn, in other words.)</p><p></p><p>And to me, that's just about perfect. When I want something pre-written -- who is in the palace of the Emperor of the Church, which captains of the watch are on the take, give me some lore about the dominant religion in the empire -- it's there. But if I want to drop, say, Lost Mines of Phandelver into the setting, which I've done, there are lots of blank areas of the map that I can do so without having to do surgery on the adventure unless I want to.</p><p></p><p>When I use a pre-written setting or adventure -- and I mostly don't -- I purchased it because it offers something specific I'm interested in. (Ptolus is a renaissance-era city about to fall backwards into a Dark Age, featuring a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire on the verge of a civil war, and a setting that explicitly includes everything in the 3E core books, rather than them having to be shoehorned in. Freeport, which I also own, is a pirate city.) I want it to provide that thing and then get out of the way. Don't give me so much of stuff other than your hook that I have to cut it away to fit it into my game.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Whizbang Dustyboots, post: 8996860, member: 11760"] So, I have used Ptolus since 2006. And it is a [I]brick[/I]. At the time, it was the largest RPG book ever published and is almost certainly one of the biggest still today. But even in the city, I don't know what each building is or who lives there, and there are whole neighborhoods that are pretty lightly sketched. In the Dungeon beneath the city, points of interest are detailed, but there's a lot of blank space. And outside the city, there is only the lowest level of detail. Whole countries get less than five sentences of information. (It's not Harn, in other words.) And to me, that's just about perfect. When I want something pre-written -- who is in the palace of the Emperor of the Church, which captains of the watch are on the take, give me some lore about the dominant religion in the empire -- it's there. But if I want to drop, say, Lost Mines of Phandelver into the setting, which I've done, there are lots of blank areas of the map that I can do so without having to do surgery on the adventure unless I want to. When I use a pre-written setting or adventure -- and I mostly don't -- I purchased it because it offers something specific I'm interested in. (Ptolus is a renaissance-era city about to fall backwards into a Dark Age, featuring a pseudo-Holy Roman Empire on the verge of a civil war, and a setting that explicitly includes everything in the 3E core books, rather than them having to be shoehorned in. Freeport, which I also own, is a pirate city.) I want it to provide that thing and then get out of the way. Don't give me so much of stuff other than your hook that I have to cut it away to fit it into my game. [/QUOTE]
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