Customer Reviews

Ptolus City by the Spire (Malhavoc)

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Monte Cook's ultimate masterpiece, Ptolus: City by the Spire, is without a doubt one of the finest gaming supplements I have ever seen in the 20+ years I've been gaming. It is the culmination of Monte Cook's game designing career, and fits it with many of his previous products (in fact, several of them implicitly or explicitly involve Ptolus: The Banewarrens, Chaositech, and Queen of Lies come to mind)

The first chapter of the book is the Player's Guide to Ptolus (also available for free online, but in B&W). It gives an overview of the city, the people, and the world in which the city resides. Next, the book goes on to give more information about the world around Ptolus, Praemal. Monte gives just enough information to get you started here. It's obvious he intends for individual DMs to customize the world of Praemal to fit their own styles and campaigns. Praemal isn't the focus of this book anyway. Next, the book details the major organizations that can be found in the city, from the benign to the malevolent. This is where you start to find really great ideas for adventures and scenarios.

After the first three chapters, the next chapter constitutes the best, and most detailed guide to a city ever detailed for D&D. Every region of the city gets its own section complete with important locations, rumors, adventure hooks, important NPCs, and how it all fits in the history of the city. The maps are well done down to the individual buildings and are supplemented with other maps throughout the book detailing typical houses, stores, apartment buildings, guild halls, government buildings, etc. This section is lovingly written almost like a travelogue. Once you read through it a few times, it will seem almost as though you've been there. And if it doesn't, you'll certainly want to go there.

After the description of the city proper, comes a chapter that talks about running a campaign in Ptolus. It includes hints on how to run urban adventures, notes on special equipment and other items you'll find in the city (firearms!), and especially helpful: a whole section on LIVING in Ptolus, down to how much it costs to rent a flat or home, or buy one and how much money you'll need to earn per month to enjoy a certain standard of living. This type of detail really makes urban campaigns stand out. All too often, a game session ends with characters "making camp" until the next time all the player's meet. Ptolus makes it easy to say the character just go home and deal with their day-to-day life while allowing the players a say in just what that day-to-day life entails.

After the DM Companion section comes a section on what is beneath the city. Since Ptolus was the original playtesting campaign for the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, it wouldn't be complete without...a dungeon! Of course, the dungeon in this case is an interconnect series of sewers, natural caverns, what was on the land before the city was built over it, mad wizard's labyrinths, an abandoned dwarven city, and much more. You can use all of it, or none of it. It's called "The Dungeon" only to make it easy to reference. How it affects the city, and how the city affects it is meticulously detailed, yet it is left open for DMs to insert anything they want down there. If you wanted to insert the entirety of the "World's Largest Dungeon" beneath Ptolus, you could easily accomplish it. I love how it's integrated, yet modular.

After "Beneath the Streets," come chapters with adventures for the city setting. The first of these is a series of low-level adventures intended to get the players familiar with the setting and set up some recurring nemeses and allies for the characters. Once that particular adventure path is finish, DMs can segue into Ptolus's companion product "The Night of Dissolution," or go off in their own direction because the following chapters detail what is on the spire, by which the city resides: two fortresses of ultimate evil. These are high-level (near epic) areas which spell certain death to anyone ill-equipped to explore them. They are intended as end-game areas in which a campaign can come to a glorious or horrible end. Monte gets very creative with the evil here, and it's easy to imagine your player's screeching in terror as they flee, flee, flee.

Finally, the product includes an index. A USABLE index, a rarity in this industry, it seems. I can find really no fault with this product. The editing, by Sue Weinlein Cook, is superb (of course, it's not perfect, no book is, particularly in its first printing). The layout makes it easy to read and reference, particular the use of sidebars to detail what gather information checks might reveal about individuals or locations, and other fun notes, including Monte's comments on how his campaign dealt with certain NPCs, organizations, or items. The binding is heavy-duty, sturdy, and shows no signs of breaking down after 6+ months of constant usage. The book is heavy, though. Carrying it around all day in a backpack WILL cause pain. But it is an 800+ page book, after all.

If you can find a copy of this, buy it. If you can't, get the PDFs. If you love D&D, you'll love Ptolus.

...well, almost the best. Actually, I'd put "Ptolus" in a tie with "Harn", the magnificent game setting by Columbia Games. But with "Harn" for low-powered, low-magic fantasy, and "Ptolus" for high-powered, high-fantasy, you're done. You really needn't buy another fantasy roleplaying supplement. (Granted, "Harn" comprises over 2 dozen separate publications, but still.)

Quite simply, given the constraint of minutely detailing a city rather than a countryside or world, it gives you everything you need. There is a teeming amount of detail, enough to make you feel like you're a Ptolusite. There are enough plot hooks and interesting adventure ideas to fill five campaigns, let alone one. And if you don't want to construct adventures yourself, there are enough actual adventures and detailed encounters to easily take a group of characters to 20th level...in fact, choosing different paths through the premade adventures, enough to take two groups to 20th.

There is also plenty of grist for the mill no matter what urban campaign style you want to run. Want to infiltrate an organization and topple it or control it? It's there. Want to play the game of thrones with the powers that be, discovering their political plots and interconnections while creating some of your own? It's there. Want to delve underground and fight magnificent monsters and take their junk? It's there. Want to save the world? It's there.

The foundational strength of Ptolus, however, lies in Monte Cook's genius. Here, he has constructed a location and backstory for that location that supports all of the wacky, high-powered conceits of the D&D universe. He started with the basic premise "If beings really lived in a D&D like universe, what would there motivations, life, and ambitions be like?" The result is a setting where it makes sense that you strap on a backpack and go spelunking to fight evil monsters, where you can walk down the street with a dire bear next to you and a glowing sword on your back,and where magicians hurl fireballs at each other in an alley. Yet, Cook has also included natural controls that would be developed by such a society so a GM's players don't simply trash the setting (Knights of the Dinner Table, anyone?)

In the final analysis, the best endorsement I can give is this: I've been collecting RPG supplements and systems for over 30 years, and rather than being my typically scattered self, all I read and use is Ptolus. It's that good. It will be the best money you've ever spent on RPGs. I promise.

The first thing I looked at was the price tag. I'm a huge fan of Monte Cook's works, but wasn't sure I wanted to spend that amount of cash on ANY campaign setting, let alone Ptolus. I gave this setting a chance and wasn't disappointed one bit.

City by the Spire is an amazing feat of world-building. From the history of the city, to the description of the individual city wards, to the unique personalities that populate it bring the setting to life. Included are personal notes of how Cook introduced certain aspects into his own City of the Spire game. So it's not just a game designer giving run-of-the-mill tips or adventurer ideas: it's the experience of one gamer to another.

I also like how he incorporates classes from the D&D Basic Set into the setting without the need for special ability revisions or optional rules. The prestige classes are not numerous, but each one is appropriately balanced for gameplay, which is contrary to WOTC's current trend of supplement creation.

These elements, plus the handouts and the CD-ROM with additional gaming material, make City by the Spire a truly worthwhile investment to your gaming experience. It's worth every penny!

I bought Ptolus because it looked like a handy way to have adventures for D&D (having little time to cook them myself). I found that the book is exceptionally good. Design in much like a travel guide; you can nearly see the streets. It is good to read, fills your minds with ideas, and seems very nice to play in (haven't played much yet). The book covers every part of the city, with enough detail to play straight from the book, or to allow you to create complex plots involving multiple power groups. The book is very pretty, well written and in hypertext. My only critic is that that the economics of the city doesn't look very solid to me, but no adventurer really cares about that. And for the things the DM and players care for, the book is wonderful. It is the kind of book that makes you want to play.

While this is one of the best campaign add-ons in the d20 genre, marking it for sale at $695 is at best, an insult to anyone's intelligence.
This is a beautiful piece, full of life. The city breathes almost straight out of the box. The additional CD-Rom material is a blessing for those wanting even more in the way of hooks, plots, and killer devices to ensure your players are kept busy for ages. This city never gets boring. Find it somewhere else for much cheaper, however. This is ludicrous. If I wasn't still using mine I'd offer it up for $60-80 and feel secure in my sale.

If you've never seen a heavily annotated book, you're in for a wonderful surprise! Imagine starting your party in one section of the city, and you wander into a bar. The name of the bar, the street its on, who runs it, who they're connected to legally or illegally, and what peope might be found there are all listed. And not just the bar! Every major building, every major street, is FILLED with luscious detail so that literally you can run a campaign just moving from footnote to footnote.

Ahh... DMgasm.

If you've got access to any copy of this, cherish it! I have never seen a better compiled sourcebook.