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After taking a month off for mental health reasons, I'm back and my game still needs help.
While I was off in December, I learned about the two big city setting books that were already put out that year, Ptolus and World's Largest City. I figured that since most new Dungeons and Dragons players are starting at level one, and are generally intimidated by the normal dungeon crawl that most Dungeon Masters want to put their players through, I figured I would give my theoretical new players a break.
I researched both of the setting books and they have their strengths and weaknesses. Ptolus is author Monte Cook's magnum opus to the D20 community. It is put out by Malhavoc Press, and retails for $120. According to the web site for Ptolus, it was Mr. Cook's homebrew setting for his Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 and later 3.5 game. It is some 700+ pages long and even has a separate free Player's Guide PDF for players to learn about the setting available at
http://www.drivethrurpg.com (registration required) or you can go to pretty much any web site that sells Role Playing Games and get a print version for $3.00 + shipping, or a package of 5 books for $15.00 + shipping. The setting has a very rich back story and is meant to be played on its own as a setting rather than integrated into a Pre-Made setting like Eberron or Forgotten Realms. Ptolus has the advantage of being written, and put together by one author so there's some continuity in the structure of the whole thing. Ptolus also has smaller maps of the city that covers each district with street names.
World's Largest City (WLC) is put out by AEG Publishing and is about 700+ pages long, and retails for a much more reasonable $100. The thing about WLC is that it is generic, unlike Ptolus. This makes it good for being put into a setting of your choice, whether it is homebrew or Pre-Made. World's Largest City is not as ground breaking as 2004's release by AEG of their World's Largest Dungeon, but it is a good choice if you want something to put into your setting that you can populate with NPC's of your own design. The thing about WLC is that it comes with maps that form a roughly 6 foot x 6 foot map of the city, but it does not have any street names on it even though there are street names in the book. WLC also has the disadvantage of having been written by some 10 (or more) different writers; one for each section of the city. This makes continuity between sections of the city tricky.
Since I'm a new Dungeon Master, and I wanted something that was just drop the players in and go, I decided on Ptolus. Ptolus also had some features I liked, like using only the core classes from the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook are used in the game, and that makes for none of the chaos caused by the splat book classes. It also has the use of black powder weapons in it. This was something I was struggling to introduce in my homebrew setting, and having it integrated into the setting with rules and everything is neat.
The next time we meet, I want to hear some advice from fellow Dungeon Masters about gathering players for your game. I'm painfully shy and I just don't want to walk up to strangers and ask them if they would like to take part in my D&D game. To send me your ideas, just e-mail me at the address above and remove the nospam between the hotmail and .com part.
Thanks,
Mathew B.
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