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Ptolus Pthoughts |  |
I finally finished reading Ptolus the other day, and I’ve been letting my thoughts percolate for the past few days. I’ve decided that I’m not going to do a full review for a couple of reasons. First, the review would be ridiculously long and I’ve already covered a number of aspects of the book, anyway. Instead, I’m just going to present my thoughts on the book, in a sort of rambling fashion. Enjoy.
As a campaign setting, Ptolus falls a little flat for me. It’s huge, it’s deluxe, it’s incredibly thorough, and it’s got almost everything your PCs will need to go from 1st level to level 20+, without ever leaving the confines off the city. That said (and I believe I’ve mentioned this before), Ptolus feels a little generic. This generic-ness is, at once, the book’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. I don’t think I’m ever going to use Ptolus for its intended purpose, as a campaign setting. To me, Eberron does a lot of what Ptolus does, but it does it with more panache and originality. To be fair, Ptolus was created first (though Eberron came out first), but I still like the WotC’s setting better, and given the choice I’ll use it instead.
As I said, though, the fact that Ptolus is generic is also a great source of strength. Because it is so generic, and because it is so painstakingly detailed, most elements of Ptolus can be lifted out of the setting and used independently of it, whole cloth, in other settings. There are literally dozens upon dozens of locales, NPCs, organizations, plot hooks, adventure seeds, even entire dungeons within the tome’s covers, and most of them are generic enough to be used in most D&D settings, but flavorful enough to be worth using. In this way, Ptolus actually becomes the ultimate mega-supplement for your favorite D&D setting, chocked full of invaluable, imminently usable material worth the price of admission, alone. I, for example, will be using elements like the Galchutt, chaos cults, ratmen, the Dark Reliquary, the Vai, and possibly even the Balacazars and Kevris Killraven in my own Eberron campaign. They’re great elements, and they’d add a lot to any game and, best of all, they can be easily picked up and dropped into any setting with a big city (like Sharn), and even the city isn’t necessarily a prerequisite.
Of note is also the fact that there’s some steampunk technology in one of the chapters, and the book comes with an included electronic copy of Monte Cook’s Chaositech, which details the dark, twisted twin of technology. Either (or both) of these things could be easily used in your own campaign, though adding chaositech to your campaign might necessitate using the Galchutt and their associated chaos cults, too.
At any rate, those are my thoughts on Ptolus, having just read it. It’s good, but in a different way from its intent. Also, Cook does tell you which chapters to read if all you want to do is mine for ideas, which is nice and indicates that he thought that this might be the case for some people. It’s big, it’s expensive, and it’s pretty. Whether or not it’s worth the price of admission to you is a decision you’re going to have to make on your own. I can say that it’s worth it for me (or would have been, if I had actually had to pay for it), purely as a source of years worth of material.
