I just found out about your channel and website. I've been a huge fan of Ptolus for ages, though I've never had a chance to run it. I'm hyped for the setting again, thanks to your stuff here, and I'm thinking that the next fantasy campaign I run will be set in it now :)
I want to run cities, but I don't want to run THIS city. But I did get this source book to show me how to populate the city. Now I may want to get my hands on this city - so much stuff to see and do!
Excellent! I'm planning to do several more videos targeted toward Players as well. If you have anything specific you would like me to cover, please let me know!
If you happen to have a hard cover copy of the 672 page manual, I would really appreciate you looking through it to see what printing press company actually pressed and cut that huge tome, as I have a similar sized project I'd like to get printed?
Oh. So Ptolis is an RPG where there is a huge cuty and it gets into political intreague. That is pretty interesting. I perfer to play in wide open natural settings. My favorite examples of this is World of Warcraft and Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. However I think an urban setting would work too. Ptolus does remind me of Ravnica wihich is one of my favorite planes of Magic the Gathering. I can confirm that an urban setting is capable of having lots of variety. Magic the Gathering has a system of five colors. There is green, red, black, blue and white. That is used to vary the kinds of characters instead of classes. The ten factions of Ravnica, called guilds, represent all possible pairs of colors. This video claims that even nature based characters, like druids, have a place in an urban setting. I can confirm that too. Green is the color associated with nature. Even that has plenty of representation. There are little points in the video that does reminind me of green guilds. The main one is the lush areas in the city. These are the parks. Even NYC has a huge park. That is like Selesnya, the green and white guild. Another part of the video is the sewers. That is like Golgari, the green and black guild. Another part of the video is the waterways. That is like Simic, green and blue guild. Another part of the video is about how barbarians can be welcomed in the city, as long as they behave. That is like Gruul, the green and red guild. Gruul tends to hang out in the outskirts of the city. They take over what little wildrnes the plane of Ravnica has. A big part of nature in Magic the Gathering is land cards. They usually depict a variety of natural environments. All players need a sizable chunk of land cards in thier deck in order to finction. Green decks are those that are the best at using land. That is thier greatest strength. They have abilities to play extra land cards. They also have creatures that can function like land cards. In Ravnica, land cards have pictures of various parts of the city. Yet they still function the same way. Ravnica The first DND book I ever got was Guldmaster's Guide to Ravnica. It was a crossover book. That was really cool, and my imagination went wild. Ptolis may be like that, exept more depth and detail. The book is really big and thick. This video talked about worldbuilding instead of mechanics. So I don't know how this game plays. I think the sprawling city setting is interesting enough to be worth checking out.
I am getting cool ideas here. One thing I like about cities is that they tend to be be more liberal in politics. I am a liberal myself. Cities have a very crowded and diverse environment. So people have to get used to that variety, and get along with other kinds of people. They become less fearful and hateful. This leads to having a more PC mindset, which makes them more liberal. It is actually the isolated rural people that tend to be more xenophobic. They lack that kind exposure. They tend to be more conservative. It is cool that Ptolis has a wide variety of fantasy races. That is like what happens in real life, but with a fantasy twist. It is weird for drow to be banned. That part gives me an idea for a campaign. I love elves including drow. I find it really disturbing that drow are treated as an evil race in the older version of DND. Evil races in general are messed up. It would be cool to subvert this trend. Maybe the reason why drow are shot on site in Ptolis is due to racism and police brutality. It is like what happens to urban black people in real life. There could even be a story like Zootopia. That would be so cool. The player group can have all the characters, or at least one of them, work in the city guard. That is the closest thing medieval fantasy has to a police department. The players solve a mystery of missing drow. The mystery is what the story is all about. Then it is reviewed that the missing drow are imprisoned and/ or killed by racist people. Ooh! There can even be a twist where the villain is a regular elf. Regular light skinned elves are usually good guys. So this is unexpected. It does make sense though. In World and Warcraft and DND the light elves and dark elves don't like each other. They split off long ago in the lore. I don't know any deep lore on Ptolis yet. However I can imagine the same scenario happening. So a light elf could be the mastermind of the missing drow, because they have such a big racial grudge. There can even be a movement that pushes back against this villainy. It can be called Drow Lives Matter. Oh I got another campaign idea. There can be a campaign exploring religion. The video mentioned some parts of the city with holy people. That can be where they have fancy churches and that kind of thing. There are certain urban areas in real life that are heavily focused on religion. Vatican City in the the bigger city of Rome is perhaps the most famous example. Other examples are Jerusalem, Mecca and maybe even Salt Lake City. There can be a campaign like this. The villains are perhaps a group of corrupt religious people. The good guys can represent the good parts of religion. Knowing the differences between the two is an interesting thing to explore. There is a story about religion called the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It takes place in the city of Paris in the olden days. This setting is pretty similar to Ptolis except without the fantasy. I absolutely love the Disney movie of Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is one of my favorite Disney movies. I tried to read the book. I couldn't get through due to the excessive descriptions of the Notre Dame cathedral and surrounding city. This wouldn't work in a novel. However all that rich detail would be helpful for an urban RPG setting. Maybe Ptolis can have a setting like that. Maybe players can homebrew Ptolis so it resembles real life Paris. That can be so cool. Even Ravnica has a religious guild called Orzhov. That is white and black. Orzhov is religious with parts of banking and mafia mixed in. This guild is pretty weird. That can be incorporated somehow. Heck Hunchback of Notre Dame does have racism as a secondary theme. So I guess I can mix my two campaign ideas together. Maybe there is a crooked religious group led by a light elf priest. Then this group is really racist against drow. So the drow can parallel Romani instead of blacks. Ether way, there can still be a theme of racism being wrong.
@@c.d.dailey8013I think you win the award for the longest UA-cam comment I have ever seen. Let alone received! 🙂 That was some fantastic information. That was basically a whole blog post! A lot of people do view playing in one city as limiting but honestly, I have been running a game in this city since 2017 and we still have not managed to explore the entire thing. All of us have been playing DND for multiple decades so this was an experience none of us had ever had before and it has been really fun 😊
I just found out about your channel and website. I've been a huge fan of Ptolus for ages, though I've never had a chance to run it. I'm hyped for the setting again, thanks to your stuff here, and I'm thinking that the next fantasy campaign I run will be set in it now :)
@@BloodRedRook Glad to have you! Did you submit your proof of ownership to access the full website?
@@D20Pub Just did :)
I want to run cities, but I don't want to run THIS city. But I did get this source book to show me how to populate the city. Now I may want to get my hands on this city - so much stuff to see and do!
haha. Well, you can steal basically all the content and concepts from this City to make your own :D
Man i love that there people talk about other games and settings . this is aweome
Thanks! Are you doing anything with Ptolus?
Thank you. I’ll use this for players when we transition to Ptolus.
Excellent! I'm planning to do several more videos targeted toward Players as well. If you have anything specific you would like me to cover, please let me know!
Great intro to the city! Thanks!
Thank you!
If you happen to have a hard cover copy of the 672 page manual, I would really appreciate you looking through it to see what printing press company actually pressed and cut that huge tome, as I have a similar sized project I'd like to get printed?
Hopefully someone else can as I bought the PDF versions as I don't like physical stuff 😬
Oh. So Ptolis is an RPG where there is a huge cuty and it gets into political intreague. That is pretty interesting. I perfer to play in wide open natural settings. My favorite examples of this is World of Warcraft and Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. However I think an urban setting would work too. Ptolus does remind me of Ravnica wihich is one of my favorite planes of Magic the Gathering.
I can confirm that an urban setting is capable of having lots of variety. Magic the Gathering has a system of five colors. There is green, red, black, blue and white. That is used to vary the kinds of characters instead of classes. The ten factions of Ravnica, called guilds, represent all possible pairs of colors. This video claims that even nature based characters, like druids, have a place in an urban setting. I can confirm that too. Green is the color associated with nature. Even that has plenty of representation. There are little points in the video that does reminind me of green guilds. The main one is the lush areas in the city. These are the parks. Even NYC has a huge park. That is like Selesnya, the green and white guild. Another part of the video is the sewers. That is like Golgari, the green and black guild. Another part of the video is the waterways. That is like Simic, green and blue guild. Another part of the video is about how barbarians can be welcomed in the city, as long as they behave. That is like Gruul, the green and red guild. Gruul tends to hang out in the outskirts of the city. They take over what little wildrnes the plane of Ravnica has. A big part of nature in Magic the Gathering is land cards. They usually depict a variety of natural environments. All players need a sizable chunk of land cards in thier deck in order to finction. Green decks are those that are the best at using land. That is thier greatest strength. They have abilities to play extra land cards. They also have creatures that can function like land cards. In Ravnica, land cards have pictures of various parts of the city. Yet they still function the same way.
Ravnica The first DND book I ever got was Guldmaster's Guide to Ravnica. It was a crossover book. That was really cool, and my imagination went wild. Ptolis may be like that, exept more depth and detail. The book is really big and thick. This video talked about worldbuilding instead of mechanics. So I don't know how this game plays. I think the sprawling city setting is interesting enough to be worth checking out.
I am getting cool ideas here. One thing I like about cities is that they tend to be be more liberal in politics. I am a liberal myself. Cities have a very crowded and diverse environment. So people have to get used to that variety, and get along with other kinds of people. They become less fearful and hateful. This leads to having a more PC mindset, which makes them more liberal. It is actually the isolated rural people that tend to be more xenophobic. They lack that kind exposure. They tend to be more conservative. It is cool that Ptolis has a wide variety of fantasy races. That is like what happens in real life, but with a fantasy twist. It is weird for drow to be banned. That part gives me an idea for a campaign. I love elves including drow. I find it really disturbing that drow are treated as an evil race in the older version of DND. Evil races in general are messed up. It would be cool to subvert this trend. Maybe the reason why drow are shot on site in Ptolis is due to racism and police brutality. It is like what happens to urban black people in real life. There could even be a story like Zootopia. That would be so cool. The player group can have all the characters, or at least one of them, work in the city guard. That is the closest thing medieval fantasy has to a police department. The players solve a mystery of missing drow. The mystery is what the story is all about. Then it is reviewed that the missing drow are imprisoned and/ or killed by racist people. Ooh! There can even be a twist where the villain is a regular elf. Regular light skinned elves are usually good guys. So this is unexpected. It does make sense though. In World and Warcraft and DND the light elves and dark elves don't like each other. They split off long ago in the lore. I don't know any deep lore on Ptolis yet. However I can imagine the same scenario happening. So a light elf could be the mastermind of the missing drow, because they have such a big racial grudge. There can even be a movement that pushes back against this villainy. It can be called Drow Lives Matter.
Oh I got another campaign idea. There can be a campaign exploring religion. The video mentioned some parts of the city with holy people. That can be where they have fancy churches and that kind of thing. There are certain urban areas in real life that are heavily focused on religion. Vatican City in the the bigger city of Rome is perhaps the most famous example. Other examples are Jerusalem, Mecca and maybe even Salt Lake City. There can be a campaign like this. The villains are perhaps a group of corrupt religious people. The good guys can represent the good parts of religion. Knowing the differences between the two is an interesting thing to explore. There is a story about religion called the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It takes place in the city of Paris in the olden days. This setting is pretty similar to Ptolis except without the fantasy. I absolutely love the Disney movie of Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is one of my favorite Disney movies. I tried to read the book. I couldn't get through due to the excessive descriptions of the Notre Dame cathedral and surrounding city. This wouldn't work in a novel. However all that rich detail would be helpful for an urban RPG setting. Maybe Ptolis can have a setting like that. Maybe players can homebrew Ptolis so it resembles real life Paris. That can be so cool. Even Ravnica has a religious guild called Orzhov. That is white and black. Orzhov is religious with parts of banking and mafia mixed in. This guild is pretty weird. That can be incorporated somehow. Heck Hunchback of Notre Dame does have racism as a secondary theme. So I guess I can mix my two campaign ideas together. Maybe there is a crooked religious group led by a light elf priest. Then this group is really racist against drow. So the drow can parallel Romani instead of blacks. Ether way, there can still be a theme of racism being wrong.
@@c.d.dailey8013I think you win the award for the longest UA-cam comment I have ever seen. Let alone received! 🙂 That was some fantastic information. That was basically a whole blog post!
A lot of people do view playing in one city as limiting but honestly, I have been running a game in this city since 2017 and we still have not managed to explore the entire thing. All of us have been playing DND for multiple decades so this was an experience none of us had ever had before and it has been really fun 😊