The Lost Muse
First Post
SWBaxter said:
The player's guide is the first chapter of the book, but this is an excellent suggestion.
Ptolus: Printing the monstrous PDF. . .
- Thread starter jdrakeh
- Start date
The player's guide is the first chapter of the book, but this is an excellent suggestion.
Scurvy_Platypus
Explorer
Owning the tome in question, I'd suggest breaking it up into a few different spiral bound editions. That way the books will actually last a while. The sheer amount of paper will tend to mess itself up as you flip around. I haven't printed the pdf of this specifically, but I've had to deal with documents of a similar size.
The spiral binding will help somewhat, as it'll allow you to actually lay the entire thing flat.
As a rough rule of thumb, I'd say you don't want to exceed 200 pages. Chances are you'll be able to leave chunks of the book behind doing it that way. Which means you'll be able to combine a couple of bits, and then break the Districts out into two books.
Glad you got it as a gift, it's a pretty awesome one. I expect to be getting quite a bit of use out of mine.
As for the Player's Guide... it's pretty good, but I guess it kinda depends on your players. The ones I've got certainly wouldn't (and didn't) do any kind of "homework", so I'd be careful expecting them to do so. I distributed the pdf to 'em, told 'em not to worry about the world information, and left it at that. So far, they've been on an adventure that hasn't required them knowing about the city explicitly. Where they have needed to know bits, I've just told them what their characters would be aware of and it's worked out fine.
Also, the value varies a bit depending on whether you're using Ptolus as is (including the world it's set in) or relocating it into another world. You can plug Ptolus into another world relatively easily, but there are some things you'll have to adjust for as you go along. If you're putting Ptolus into another world, then about half the Player's Guide (2nd half) is basically of very limited utility.
Tangent:
I also found a Tradepaperback of the Ptolus comic that I bought. It's nice, but not really critical. I didn't mind spending the money on it, but it only cost me $10 including shipping. One thing that's nice is it's got a small illustration that's really nice to show people the "side" of the city, so you can see just how the "levels" or tiers of the city look. It's easy to lose sight of that.
Something else I sprang for was the vinyl map. The "regular" one which was 48" x 32". It's pretty hard to find these days, although if you're _really_ wanting it, it looks like the U.K. shops still have some. It's pricey though running ~44 pounds, which for simplicity's sake you double and then add some shipping. So you can expect to shell out over $100 when you're done. I managed to find a copy for sale here in the U.S. but it took a number of hours of digging to turn it up. Maybe my search-fu is weak though.
The more practical approach would probably be to get the pdf of the map, and then take that sucker in to Kinkos and get it printed up. They've got a version that requires a large format printer and prints in 4 chunks, and the rest of the file is the same map as the vinyl one (and large format 4 chunk one), just chopped up for 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper. The advantage to this one is that you could print out chunks of the map and laminate them together, so you can just slap down the particular section of the city that you need at any one time. The large format put together would cover you for your massive map. Not as cool as the vinyl map, but more practical in the bigger scheme of things.
The spiral binding will help somewhat, as it'll allow you to actually lay the entire thing flat.
As a rough rule of thumb, I'd say you don't want to exceed 200 pages. Chances are you'll be able to leave chunks of the book behind doing it that way. Which means you'll be able to combine a couple of bits, and then break the Districts out into two books.
Glad you got it as a gift, it's a pretty awesome one. I expect to be getting quite a bit of use out of mine.
As for the Player's Guide... it's pretty good, but I guess it kinda depends on your players. The ones I've got certainly wouldn't (and didn't) do any kind of "homework", so I'd be careful expecting them to do so. I distributed the pdf to 'em, told 'em not to worry about the world information, and left it at that. So far, they've been on an adventure that hasn't required them knowing about the city explicitly. Where they have needed to know bits, I've just told them what their characters would be aware of and it's worked out fine.
Also, the value varies a bit depending on whether you're using Ptolus as is (including the world it's set in) or relocating it into another world. You can plug Ptolus into another world relatively easily, but there are some things you'll have to adjust for as you go along. If you're putting Ptolus into another world, then about half the Player's Guide (2nd half) is basically of very limited utility.
Tangent:
I also found a Tradepaperback of the Ptolus comic that I bought. It's nice, but not really critical. I didn't mind spending the money on it, but it only cost me $10 including shipping. One thing that's nice is it's got a small illustration that's really nice to show people the "side" of the city, so you can see just how the "levels" or tiers of the city look. It's easy to lose sight of that.
Something else I sprang for was the vinyl map. The "regular" one which was 48" x 32". It's pretty hard to find these days, although if you're _really_ wanting it, it looks like the U.K. shops still have some. It's pricey though running ~44 pounds, which for simplicity's sake you double and then add some shipping. So you can expect to shell out over $100 when you're done. I managed to find a copy for sale here in the U.S. but it took a number of hours of digging to turn it up. Maybe my search-fu is weak though.
The more practical approach would probably be to get the pdf of the map, and then take that sucker in to Kinkos and get it printed up. They've got a version that requires a large format printer and prints in 4 chunks, and the rest of the file is the same map as the vinyl one (and large format 4 chunk one), just chopped up for 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper. The advantage to this one is that you could print out chunks of the map and laminate them together, so you can just slap down the particular section of the city that you need at any one time. The large format put together would cover you for your massive map. Not as cool as the vinyl map, but more practical in the bigger scheme of things.
Olaf the Stout
Legend
Timmundo said:
But you can't e-mail the players just the player's guide part of your big PDF. You would have to print it out for them in order to give them a copy to read. By directing them to the free PDF they can download a copy for themselves.
Olaf the Stout
Similar Threads
