Is Ptolus living up to the hype?

[DaveMage]

I've only read about 1/5 of the book so far (128 pages or so), but so far I am very impressed.

Monte described it as "D&D with the volume turned all the way up". I'm not sure I'd agree with that (I think Oathbound would be a better candidate for that description), but so far Ptolus is the single most impressive d20/D&D product out there (IMO).

The page references on the sidebars are a great addition and should be a standard in all RPG books.

The editing/proofreading has been stellar. I've only noticed 1 typo in the 128 pages I've read.

Best of all, though, it's an interesting read. Nothing I've read so far has been useless info.

 

[Driddle]

Nothing useful to add.

 

[Odhanan]

Ptolus lives up to the hype and provides more, much more than I originally expected. This is one of the best city/setting/D&D RPG books I've ever seen.

I suspect many people who are in my "camp" actually prefer to play it rather than post about it.

 

[MojoGM]

Nothing useful to add.

Gotta pad that post-count, huh?

Not that *I'd* ever do that...

 

[Odhanan]

First, there is definitely a group of people who are very impressed with the organization, the level of detail, and the sheer bulk of the thing. The two gripes that these people have are that many magic items mentioned in the book aren't actually statted up therein (the reader is referred to another product for the stats) and that the information on the city beneath the city (the first city of Ptolus, now buried) is very sparse.

Second, there is definitely a group of people who are impressed with the organization, the level of detail, and the sheer bulk of the thing -- but who are severely disappointed that, thematically, the book brings nothing new to the table. These folks could care less about omitted magic items, and are more concerned with the lack of new and interesting ideas in the book (many of them have compared it to a more detailed Waterdeep).

I can just remember one, maybe two threads from RPGnet that criticized Ptolus in those terms with most people plugging in on the very specific concerns of the OP rather than coming up with genuine concerns on their own. These are hardly evidences of wide criticism out there. Could you provide us with links which would allow us to assess the accuracy of your statement here? Thanks!

 

[HiLiphNY]

I'm a HUGE fan of the Book. Love it, and own it. This said, I would love to see the Coop take a once-over of the tome and weigh in with his review.

Coop?

 

[w_earle_wheeler]

A friend of mine who works at a game store bought Ptolus to use in running his first ever D&D game. He's a board game nut and he really loves Ptolus.

Right now, he's the only person I know IRL who owns a copy. Several of us are still considering buying it.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

From what I'm gathering so far, Ptolus seems to be on par with an very detailed city book such as Sharn: City of Towers, which many agree could have been a setting book in and of itself as is and even more so had it a higher page count and more details instead of one or two paragraph descriptions of its various districts.

(And please keep the thread on topic and stop padding posts. It's a waste of server storage and bandwidth consumption. Sometimes I wish forums never had postcounts at all.)

 

[Festivus]

Way more than a paragraph or two on each district. More like 10-20 pages.

I originally didn't want to buy it, mainly due to the price, but after downloading and reading the players guide I decided to purchase it and use it as the setting for my next campaign. I am very happy with my purchase and feel money well spent on this as a setting book.

As for undercity stuff, Rappan Athuk Reloaded fits very well under the Necropolis and provides for almost endless underground adventuring. I also found that, along with the two free adventures that came with Ptolus (Banewarrens and Night of Disolusion), there was more than sufficient information contained in both the campaign journals and the big book itself to make developing stuff there a breeze. There is sufficient stuff included to be able to run at least three unique campaigns spanning levels 1-20 without lifting a finger to build anything.

I personally feel like the concentration on NPC interactions and backstories really contributes to making this a very immersive setting, and the indexing and cross reference information makes it easy to quickly locate information you might need.

So I am in that third camp nobody mentioned, sceptical at first, now impressed.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You might want to read Ptolus thoroughly before you make such statements...

"The Ptolus campaign is the d20 rules with the volume turned all the way up" -- Monte Cook (A Player's Guide to Ptolus, Introduction; Ptolus, Introduction)

And you might want to spend more than 10 minutes with the book. Everything in it follows the 3E demographics to the logical end point. This isn't XTREMEME DEE AND DEE, it's just D&D.