Design Diary: Part VII: Running a Ptolus Campaign

By Monte Cook

The Ptolus book has seven parts, covering everything from the world to the districts of the city, the areas above and below the city, and advice on running and playing in the Ptolus Campaign. In this set of Design Diaries, I discuss each part and give you a little background on its contents and my design goals for it.

From Design Day One, I knew that there would be a Part VII of the Ptolus book. Well, I didn't know it would be "Part VII," but I knew there would be a part of the book that dealt with new rules material. Remember, practically everything I've written for Malhavoc Press (and a lot I've done for Fiery Dragon, Atlas Games, and others) has come out of the Ptolus Campaign. It's always been a testing ground for new 3rd Edition rules material (in fact, it was one of the first such testing grounds that existed).

So, Part VII of the book has new monsters, new spells, new magic items, and new prestige classes. We've seen that kind of material before, obviously. The difference, from a design point of view, is that everything has grown naturally out of this setting. The real truth is, I didn't want this book to have any new rules material. I didn't want it to be that kind of book. But like I said, I knew from Day One that such material would be needed. We'd need rules for the Dread One's Staff, for hungerswords, and for the spells that the Inverted Pyramid mages have come up with. We'd need rules for Knights of the Pale, Knights of the Chord, and for Forsaken Shigmaa. And we'd need stats for the ratmen of the sewers, for the skulks that haunt the alleyways of the city, and for the Wintersouled. But because I didn't want Ptolus to be a book of new rules material; I only put in the stuff that was really vital to the campaign. Ptolus is meant to be a core d20 setting and, for the most part, I think I stayed true to that goal.

Some of you reading this are likely to recognize some of those items, classes, and whatnot. Well, like I said, Malhavoc material has grown out of Ptolus, so it should be no surprise that some of the material vital to the setting has already seen the light of day in previous products. However, I didn't want to jam the book with material that die-hard Malhavoc Press fans already had. I didn't want to waste your time and money. So I put a great deal of time and effort into making the Ptolus book hinge on as little old material as possible. In some cases, that meant tweaking things here and there. An eldritch warrior (see The Complete Book of Eldritch Might) became an arcane knight. A mirror master (again, The Complete Book of Eldritch Might) became a wizard. I glossed over eye golems (again, The Complete Book of Eldritch Might) and harrids (which had found their way into Arcana Evolved).

DM Advice

This part of the book isn't all about rules material, though. This is also where I wrote a lot of DMing advice, both for Ptolus Campaigns in specific as well as urban campaigns in general. I wrote about different kinds of foci for a Ptolus Campaign, such as the Dungeon campaign (dealing with things mainly under the city, using Ptolus itself mostly as a place to rest and re-equip), the Sreets campaign (dealing mainly with criminal elements in the city), and a lot of other options. I personally like the idea of a Streets campaign where the PCs are actually involved on some low-end of a criminal organization, like the Balacazar family, and either try to work their way up the ranks or start their own organization. Using the Godfather movies or The Sopranos as inspiration (or possibly Steven Brust's "Vlad Taltos" books), this campaign could be a real change of pace for those willing to have PCs that aren't so nice.

I tried very hard to include as much detailed advice as I could regarding running a Ptolus Campaign. Taking on this huge book, with all its information, can be daunting. So there's advice about weaving together material for a campaign, using campaign villains, and establishing goals for the player characters. The latter two, I think, are important because they help give a campaign focus. If the PCs want to join a particular organization, that gives everything they do a singular focus, even after they're successful. And if there's a good long-term villain as a thorn in their side, that also works nicely as a lure from scenario to scenario (although you don't want to overdo that one).

And urban adventures aren't exactly like normal (usually "dungeon" or "wilderness") adventures, so I spent a lot of time examining the differences and pointing out solutions for the unique problems that arise. For example, you have to take into account that in the middle of a city, there's likely a nearby temple with a cleric who can cast remove blindness/deafness, so going blind isn't as bad as it might be out in the wilderness. And what do you do if the PCs just want to run to the City Watch and let them take care of the problem they've discovered? That, I think, is the thing that trips up a lot of DMs, so I dwelt on that topic quite a bit.

Lastly, there are some rules guidelines for handling nonstandard urban encounters like fires and mobs. I particularly like the rules for dealing with fires. Based on an off-hand comment made by Mike Mearls, I made fires sort of like monsters -- they have Hit Dice based on their size and take "damage" from water and other extinguishing methods, but they also deal damage each round in various "attacks." This method can make running into a burning building to save a trapped victim as interesting and exciting an encounter as fighting a dangerous foe.

Adventures

And of course, Part VII of Ptolus also includes the Adventures chapter. This lengthy chapter provides scenarios enabling you to jump right into Ptolus with ready-made starting adventures. A word of warning, though: Most of these scenarios are well-tested and well-worn, which means that they've probably been "spoiled" in a Ptolus Campaign Journal someplace on this site. So if you want to run them, don't let your players read those journals. That said, if the DM has read the journals, I hope he'll get a kick out of putting his PCs up against Shilukar, Helmut Itlestein, and others now infamous in my own campaign.

These scenarios intentionally show off various aspects of Ptolus; they involve criminal gangs, strange stuff going on underground, and manipulative NPCs who could very well turn into recurring campaign villains. They also intentionally introduce the player characters to powerful NPCs that might end up being important allies as the campaign progresses. Hopefully, these adventures will get any campaign off to a good start. And, if you want, you can easily segue from them right into The Night of Dissolution adventure without missing a beat, and then go to Dwarvenhearth (or the Banewarrens), the Dark Reliquary, Goth Gulgamel, etc.... and maybe even Jabel Shammar. Before you know it, the campaign's done and the DM hasn't had to lift a finger to create new adventures. That's intentional, of course, because as promised, Ptolus wasn't designed to just be a campaign setting, it's a campaign.

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