Catching the Ptolus bug

I don't really pay all that much attention to new d20 gaming product releases other than official D&D products from WOTC and those that are sold through RPGNow and DriveThruRPG, so I didn't know too much about Monte Cook's Ptolus campaign setting when the coupon e-mails for the Ptolus Deluxe City Map and the miniatures-scale map of the Ghostly Minstrel (a tavern) arrived in my inbox. However, I almost always buy the newest releases in SkeletonKey Games's miniatures-scale fantasy lines, so I took a chance on these. In a way, I wish I hadn't ... because I'm starting to get inordinately interested in Ptolus, which is a very expensive product.

The Ptolus Deluxe City Map from SkeletonKey Games is precisely what the name implies: an impressive map of the city of Ptolus. Actually, it's a series of maps; there are actually six PDFs supplied with this product. One of the PDFs is a seventy-page map booklet, containing sixty-six separate maps designed for printing on regular letter-sized paper. You can piece these maps together to make an overall poster map of Ptolus, or use individual maps as appropriate. If you have access to a large-format printer (at least 23" x 57"), you can use the four individual large-format files and save yourself some tape. The sixth PDF covers the whole city on a single page, and is intended for on-screen use. The amount of detail in these maps is stunning. Every building in the city seems to be represented on the maps. The beauty and detail of Ed Bourelle's city map makes me eager to find out what's inside.

Miniatures-scale Ptlous Adventure Maps of prominent locations with Ptolus are also planned by SkeletonKey Games, and the first release was the Ghostly Minstrel, a tavern in the city. Unlike SKG's e-Adventure Tiles, the Ptolus tiles are not modular; they must be assembled a certain way to create a unique location, but the cobblestones match the cobblestones in e-Adventure Tiles products, so some degree of mixing and matching is possible. Each of the three floors of the tavern is composed of eight tiles. As always with SkeletonKey miniatures-scale tile products, the artwork is excellent. The layout of the Ghostly Minstrel itself is logical, and there is plenty of storage—but a distinct lack of a privy.

These two SKG products got me interested in learning more about Ptolus, so I also picked up Silven Trumpeter vol. 4 no. 1, which includes two special Ptolus features. One of these is an interview with Monte Cook, designer of Ptolus. The interview isn't quite as revealing as I might have liked—the focus seemed to be as much on the design process as on the product's content—but I was quite intrigued by this exchange:

Silven: The holy symbol of the Church of Lothian, the ankh crucifix, appears in the very logo of Ptolus. This implies that this particular religion is absolutely integral to the setting and the city itself. How true is this? Or is the inclusion of that particular symbol in the logo simply a bit of flavor?

Monte: Well, it’s both, really. The Church of Lothian is the “official” religion of the Empire of which Ptolus is a part. It’s a very Roman Catholic-like church and it’s as monotheistic a religion as one could probably realistically expect in a d20 setting that clings hard to the core rules. A little over half of the city’s population are Lothianites. But then, in addition to the worship of Lothian, Ptolus has hundreds of other religions—the rest of the city’s worshippers revere a whole plethora of different gods. The cool thing about this is that it means that if the DM (or the players, or both) want to have a more real world Medieval Europe flavor to the game, the game can focus on Lothian—a large, basically monotheistic-style church with real political power and influence. Or, if they want a more traditional core rules experience, which usually involves a whole bunch of different gods, they can have that too.

Given my own attempts to craft a predominantly monotheistic campaign setting, I'm very interested in what Monte has done to pull this off.

The second Silven Trumpeter special feature on Ptolus is a two-page insert that corresponds to pp. 188-189 of the Ptolus book itself. This excerpt is part of Chapter 9: Guildsman District, and these particular pages detail three locations: Longdraught Brewery, Mason's Guildhall, and The Midden Heaps. Each location includes a map key, economic information, and a text description whose length varies from entry to entry. This is fairly typical urban gazetteer stuff, perhaps, but the quality of these three entries is rather hight. Page 189 includes a detail map of the Midden Heaps. An exceptionally nice feature—which according to the Silven Trumpeter interview with Monte, is typical of the whole product—is the appearance on each page of a sidebar with notes and cross-references.

Impressed with the Silven Trumpeter insert and interview, I decided to visit Monte's web site to learn more about Ptolus. I downloaded the three-page preview from Chapter 6: Organizations. If this preview and the Silven Trumpeter insert are any indication of the richness of the overall Ptolus book, then this is going to be one amazing product.

And it had better be. The price tag for pre-orders (which garners you a bonus CD and free adventure module) is a whopping $119. Apparently, Malhavoc Press was offering a kind of installment plan if you pre-ordered far enough in advance, but I failed to do this. I am tremendously impressed with this product, but not yet convinced that I want to pay $119 for a city book. But considering that this single city can be the setting for a complete campaign, and that I hope to continue playing for years to come, I may well be persuaded to save up for it.

Filed in: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Ptolus, Monte Cook, Malhavoc Press, SkeletonKey Games

The strange silence is broken ...

It's been a long time since my last Fahrvonhier post, and this one doesn't really have much of substance. Nathan and I have not played the Fahrvonhier campaign since sometime in March or April. There has just been too much going on most weekends for us to get around to it, and summer vacation doesn't seem to bode any better, as Nathan will be spending a lot of his time playing with friends and cousins.

The quest for the Rainbow Fan of Xaisu Ba will continue, but probably not until late July. If that changes, I'll let you know.

Another factor has been that Heardworld.com has been in the process of migrating to a new web hosting service, and at the same time I've been teaching a summer class (the equivalent of one semester in four weeks).

Filed in: Fahrvonhier, Dungeons & Dragons, D&D

Another Hugo nomination for Martin

Sci Fi Wire reports today that George R. R. Martin has been nominated for another Hugo award—his seventeenth!—for A Feast for Crows, book four of his A Song of Ice and Fire series. This nomination is richly deserved. A Song of Ice and Fire is an awe-inspiring, epic story, and A Feast for Crows is a spectactular installment in the series. If you have not already read this series, then by all means get started today. You have a little time before volume 5 is slated for release (2007). The full series consists at the moment of A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and the aforementioned A Feast for Crows. Be sure that you read the stories in order; otherwise, many things will make no sense to you.


Filed in: George Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, A Feast for Crows>, Hugo awards

Gary Gygax's (well, Dan Cross's) Insidiae

Gary Gygax's Insidiae: The Brainstomer's Guide to Adventure Writing, recently released by Troll Lord Games as PDF through RPGNow (it's been available in print since 2004), can enhance your adventure-writing skills—if you don't mind some of the book's quirks.

"Book One: Milieu Events" suggests a number of different background events that can set the tone for a whole campaign or series of adventures. A table is provided for GMs who wish to determine such things randomly, but several pages of description of each possibility are given, with many possible variations.

"Book Two: Story Roles" focuses on NPCs and their functions in the overall adventure. This section is not a compilation of canned NPC stat blocks, but a nice discussion of how NPCs in different roles might interact with the PCs, whether as ally, competitor, enemy, hinderer, neutral, patron, or "wild card." Each of these types of relationships receives about a page or page-and-a-half treatment of suggestions on how such characters fit into adventure storylines.

"Book Three: Characteristics" offers suggestions for filling out NPCs. This section opens with a set of not-very-useful tables for randomly generating NPC classes (in d20, Lejendary Adventures, and Castles & Crusades terms). There follows a too-brief treatment of NPC motivation, followed by a long and more useful survey of different NPC social roles (adventurer, alchemist, desperado, destroyer, devotee, etc.) and how they might fit into various stories.

"Book Four: Plot" opens with a pedantic, but helpful, discussion of the difference between running an RPG session and writing a work of fiction. The chapter then moves into a survey of many different types of events and plot elements. The material in this chapter is not really suited to a cut-and-paste type of approach, but GMs who work through the ideas presented here could find lots of inspiration. In fact, it's probably a good exercise to try to reverse-engineer your adventures using the terminology in this chapter. If the same terms keep coming up over and over again to describe your adventures, you might be in a rut (or you might have found what works for your play group and should stick with it).

"Book Five: Objective" (a bit of an odd title) leads readers through the process of putting together the elements previously discussed into a nice overall package. There is some really good advice here for weaving together various levels of plot in to an interesting adventure or campaign.

A full one-third of Insidiae is devoted to a series of appendixes. Appendix A presents a series of random tables plus descriptions for "Ready-Made Plots." If you're feeling low on creativity, rolling on these tables, or just using the descriptions for inspiration, could jump-start your adventure design process. The "Ready-Made Plots" are described using terminology introduced earlier in the book, so jumping straight to Appendix A might also generate some random confusion; you should probably read the earlier chapters first.

Appendixes B, C, and D are largely repackaged material from other Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds products. If you don't have these products, the material can be useful; if you do, you might well be annoyed at paying for the same material twice.

Appendix E presents a sample adventure, designed and described according to the principles laid out in the main part of the book. Whether or not you like the content of the adventure, it's a helpful way of illustrating how to use the rest of Insidiae to good effect. There are also a couple of forms that could be used to organize your brainstorming, but I think most GMs who write their own adventures will outgrow these forms very quickly.

This book is credited as being written by Dan Cross and edited by Gary Gygax. It sure could have used some more editing. There are a number of small mistakes of formatting or writing which accumulate to leave the impression of a poorly edited product. For example, consider this sentence from p. 50: "Constantly and deliberately thwarting the heroes efforts serves only to frustrate players who have likely wish to assume the role of larger-than-life heroes whose fates should be indeterminable except when resultant of their own skill and puissance, as modified in the course of things by random chance." The sentence is not only overly complex, but also contains two grammatical errors. This is not an isolated example; in fact, such errors occur with some frequency. Especially noticeable are the occasional appearances of the spelling "lejend" when the "Lejendary Adventures" rules set is not specifically in view. The grammatical errors and misspellings stand out within the typically Gygaxian pompous, know-it-all tone adopted in the book, which—depending on your own personality—might either annoy or amuse you.

I enjoyed my first, cursory reading of Insidiae, and I think it will prove to be a useful tool and frequent source of inspiration and guidance for the adventures I write myself (most of which I inflict on my son, since my adult play group is working through Dragon Magazine's Age of Worms adventure path right now). The book has a certain old-school, low-aesthetics feel, which gave me a certain sense of nostalgia for late 1970s Judges Guild products, but also a desire for a more 2000s presentation and tone. At any rate, I plan to use Insidiae frequently and I think others who write their own adventures could find it helpful too.

Bits of Darkness: Dungeons II

Tabletop Adventures has released Bits of Darkness: Dungeons II, a collection of descriptive texts and "building blocks" for dungeon adventures. If you write your own dungeon adventures or like to spice up the descriptions of dungeon rooms in published adventures, you should find many useful things in Dungeons II and the other products in TTA's line.

Dungeons II includes thirty "Dungeon Bricks," including seventeen relatively well-developed descriptions of individual rooms, ten encounters (with d20 statistics) and three traps (also with d20 statistics); thirty-six "Dungeon Bits," which are short paragraphs that add descriptive flavor to dungeon locales; forty-eight "Dungeon Shards," which are more like hooks that you can use as springboards into encounter areas; and one hundred "Splinters of the Senses," which are single lines of descriptive text engaging the player's senses of sight, sound, and smell. TTA's original Bits of Darkness: Dungeons focused on "bits," and was mostly intended for you to drop in descriptions on the fly. Dungeons II material generally requires a bit more planning and forethought.

I'm especially proud of this product because I contributed a few of the "bricks" (see if you can figure out which ones). I'm also very pleased and impressed with the creativity shown by the other contributors. I've only had the final version for a few hours and I've already been inspired by the other "bricks" and "shards" in the product. I highly recommend this product!

Filed in: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, d20, Tabletop Adventures

D&D in the NYT

The New York Times ran an article last Sunday on the new Online D&D vs. old-fashioned pencil-and-paper D&D. It's quite interesting to me, and somewhat gratifying, that the NYT still considers D&D enough of a cultural phenomenon to run a story about it. Personally, I'm for pencil-and-paper, face-to-face D&D all the way. I've played RPGs online, but only in the sense of hooking up a video feed with my iSight so that I was "virtually" at the table with the narrator and other players (playing Decipher's Star Trek RPG).

Filed in: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D

Myself as a D&D character

Today on the Christian Gamers Guild e-mail list, somebody posted links to two of those online quizzes. These quizzes happen to purport to translate your real-life characteristics into D&D statistics. There are two tests, the mental test (for Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) and the physical test (for Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity). Warning: These tests are hosted by an online dating/matching service, so if you don't want the "services" such a site offers, don't enter a screen name at the end of the process. You can take the quizzes without signing up for the dating service, though. Out of curiosity, I took the test, and my results were:

STR 10
DEX 9
CON 8
INT 18
WIS 15
CHA 11

Rating myself, I would have put my STR lower than my CON (perhaps swap the numbers assigned by the quiz) and probably put my CHA a point or two higher (doggone it, people like me). The INT score might seem inflated, but I did answer all the questions honestly, and to be frank that's what I expected my highest attribute to be. Too bad my CHA is too low to be a successful Bard (under 3.5 rules). I guess I'll go with Wizard, or more likely, be a really smart Cleric.

Filed in: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D

Aargh! They did it again!

Once again, in 2006, GenCon SoCal is scheduled for the same weekend as the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting—the weekend before Thanksgiving. Once again, therefore, I won't be able to attend GenCon SoCal. A huge gaming convention practically in my backyard and I can't go because of the schedule conflict. Obviously, a professional conference is much more important, but I do so wish they'd move GenCon SoCal back to December.

Filed in: gaming conventions, GenCon SoCal