Is Ptolus living up to the hype?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For the record, I think every Goodman Games DCC fits into Praemal perfectly, and the urban adventures both fit into Ptolus wonderfully. Likewise, Freeport reads like it was designed for the Sea Kingdoms, which adds a whole bunch more content that can be added in.

 

[satori01]

My 2 cents on Ptolus living up to the hype.
Yes it definetely does!!!

As a secondary campaign, I am running the Savage Tide Adventure path, but using Ptolus as the starting city.

The book is perfect for on the fly game reference. Players are at the docks, and want to know where the Captains of ships are hanging out so they can get one to take them to the Blue Nixie.

A quick turn to the Dock chapter leads to a descriptive paragraph of just the exact place, including owners name, and in the margins is a sample captain with the name of his ship.

The Players go to a rough bar on the docks, (Savage Shark), and get involved in a fight, and I need stats for a thief on the fly, look up Longfingers guild in the margin, and bingo instant stats.

As the Savage Tide is the second campaign I am DM'ing, I am pretty much making adjustments to the story on the fly. The Ptolus book has made that so easy to do.

The book is informative, beautiful, and easy to use both under fire, and out of game for planning.

10 out of 10

 

[Gnome Quixote]

My 2 cents on Ptolus living up to the hype.
Yes it definetely does!!!

As a secondary campaign, I am running the Savage Tide Adventure path, but using Ptolus as the starting city.

I'm toying with the idea of running Savage Tide in Praemal as well, but starting from the Sea Kingdoms instead of Ptolus (probably dropping Sasserine in wholesale as Gharon).

Just out of curiousity--because I haven't quite got this part worked out myself, yet--how are you planning to run the later adventures in the path given the planar restrictions?

 

[DaveMage]

That's the general vibe I got from Ptolus, too. I was worried about future support during he preorder phase because I hadn't heard anything about future products, but then I learned the idea of Ptolus was that it was to be a complete product that didn't need additional support. Any support developed afterward would be nice, but not needed.

I think I might start buying the PDFs one at a time for future use. The PDFs add another level of DM functionality in that I can search across all of them at once as well as print of any materials I might want to reference in print format at a game table. Being able to easily copy and paste is nice, too.

By the way, Dave, I noticed you live in Gainesville, too.

Go Gators!

The other thing about Ptolus is that it really is the "adventure" center of Praemal. Significant world-changing events could happen in Ptolus (depending on your campaign) so while you could go to other areas, they're not the "hot spots".

 

[Raven Crowking]

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.

Out of curiosity, what percentage of ogre mages does the 3.5 DMG suggest appear in cities? What percentage of centaurs? What percentage of litorians and lizardmen? The claim that Ptolus follows the D&D demographics is no more true or untrue than the previous claim about Waterdeep or Greyhawk. Nor, I think, was that really the point of the product.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

That was actually another reason why I had decided against Ptolus. I was able to absorb Eberron a book at a time, and most of the books reinforced or expanded the material already presented in the Eberron Campaign Setting.

However the individual PDFs for Ptolus might seem less daunting than the 700+ pages of the book.

How is reading a large book chapter by chapter any different from reading several smaller books? (Except for the muscle ache as you hold the larger tome, of course!)

 

[Odhanan]

Out of curiosity, what percentage of ogre mages does the 3.5 DMG suggest appear in cities? What percentage of centaurs? What percentage of litorians and lizardmen? The claim that Ptolus follows the D&D demographics is no more true or untrue than the previous claim about Waterdeep or Greyhawk. Nor, I think, was that really the point of the product.

I agree. Ptolus doesn't apply D&D tropes perfectly, at the letter/digit, nor does it try to. What Ptolus does, however, is embrace the D&D "genre" and extrapolate on this basis.

If Ogre Mages are intelligent beings and can be encountered in "the dungeon", then it makes sense a very few, if only one, could make it on the surface. If you have adventurers exposed to monsters and magic all around them, including charms/compulsions, it makes sense that someone/somewhere would get the idea of making monster prisoners "good", to "redeem" them, through the use of magic; then, this person would come to Ptolus sooner or later, since it is a magnet for monsters and adventurers. Hence the Brotherhood of Redemption. If Web is a 2nd level spell, people in the street subjected to this spell won't be awed - they'd be annoyed, because that's a spell most Ptolus citizens know about. If Invisibility is low level too, then the houses of the wealthy will usually be warded against it. Et cetera.

Ptolus is an extrapolation based on D&D's tropes. Hence the "volume turned all the way up".

 

[Kristian Serrano]

How is reading a large book chapter by chapter any different from reading several smaller books? (Except for the muscle ache as you hold the larger tome, of course!)

It's pretty obvious.
1. I can fit the PDFs on my thumb drive.
2. I can create a search index of the PDFs using Windows Desktop Search or Google Desktop. If I want to find every instance of a specific name across all of the PDFs, I can.
3. The collection of PDFs that make up Ptolus is cheaper than the book.
4. Buying and reading one PDF at a time is easier to budget.
5. Digesting Ptolus one book at a time is seemingly less daunting.

 

[wedgeski]

Having purchased my copy a few days ago I can safely say that, yes, it does live up to the hype. It is - by quite some margin - the most impressive RPG book I have ever seen.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

Having purchased my copy a few days ago I can safely say that, yes, it does live up to the hype. It is - by quite some margin - the most impressive RPG book I have ever seen.

I appreciate your testimony, but I'm looking for information beyond the production quality of the book. I'm more interested in how the book and the setting work as tools and inspiration for d20 campaigns. An example of what I'm looking for is whether or not the players have enough player resources to immerse themselves in the setting?

On that note, thanks to everyone who posted their insite on this product. It seems many of you are still reading through the book, and a handful of you are just starting to use it in a campaign. I'd like to see this thread continue with updates as you use the book more and more particularly in an active campaign.