Ptolus

I picked up Monte Cooks new Ptolus game supplement, or should I say Mondo Deluxe game supplement for it is huge. It is nearly 700 pages on and about the city of Ptolus ( btw we have decided to pronounce it Tolus…the P being silent as in Pneumonia).

First things first, The extra folder included in the book has a lot of neat stuff, Citzenship papers, calendars and a copy of the local paper as well as some extras to make Gming in the big city little easier ( encounter tables, cheat sheet etc). Two things I didn’t like were the big map of the city, it’s the same graphic we have seen X times before enlarged. The other was the CD ROM, yes it does give you Mondo material in fact it gives you whole supplements in Adobe format including color cover, but I was expecting a little better on the format of the CD maybe with a Ptolus interface. I also was bummed they didn’t give me the template for the paper so I could make my own additions.

The book itself is very very cool, the artwork ranges from good to great. I love the illustrations of the streets and areas in the city. Every person referenced in the tome appears to have stats or a reference on where the stats can be found. There is just a ton of information in this book. In some ways I am reminded of Middenheim, the GW book that came out during the Hey Day of Warhammer FRP ( that I loved BTW), but this book is about 6 times the size. The Chaos angle is played up in the book ( And there is a source book on the DVD in regards) and truthfully I haven’t read enough to form a opinion. The flavor of the town and its many aspects is a joy for a GM. A CON, I was a little disappointed on the dungeons, for some reason I was expecting vast mazes on the scale of Waterdeep, there are numerous dungeons included and certainly a GM can insert his own, But I was expecting something a party could spend months trying to conquer.

All in All I am still giving this product an A despite the CONs listed. For sheer reference and completeness it is a work well done. My big sadness is I will probably run this world and never get to take a character into Delvers Square myself…oh well.