By Jason Campbell
At the end of March my players and I finished a weekly 5e campaign that began in January of 2022. It was really a great time so I’d like to share some thoughts. We began with characters at 1st level and finished at 20th level. We began the campaign with 4 players who had recently finished another campaign I’d run in a homebrew world. After about a year a fifth payer joined us, and she stayed for about a year before leaving the campaign. Later a different fifth player joined and continued until the finish of the campaign.
The players were slightly different in their approaches but they worked well as a group, all very respectful of each other. I wish I could give advice on how to build a group that works well together, but I don’t know how it happens, it was a happy accident. One of my favorite things about this group is that when we had 5 players at first we would play as long as at least 3 players showed up. Towards the end of the campaign the group decided that we would only play if at least 4 players could play, because they were concerned that other players would miss something cool.
Our group plays online, using Discord for voice and Roll20 for characters and VTT. One player is my good friend going back to high school, but the others I’ve never met in person, we met through different short games in Discord servers.
Overview
I started playing and running games with Basic D&D in 1981, and this was the longest campaign I’ve run or played in and was the most fun. There were a lot of things to love – the setting in Monte Cook’s Ptolus, the interesting group of characters, and with all I felt the freedom to create. I should stress that I usually run settings and scenarios that I create, and in this case I never planned on using Ptolus exactly by the book. My favorite part of running this campaign was in choosing parts of the book to use, changing them to fit the emerging story, and adding or ignoring anything that helped to build our story.
The Ptolus Setting
Ptolus is a setting that Monte Cook created for his home game around the 3e era, while he was working at Wizards of the Coast. The latest publication is available from Monte Cook Games for 5e based games or for Cypher System. The setting could be used for any fantasy TTRPG, it’s only the mechanics, usually the creature stat blocks, that would have to be addressed. The book is enormous at 640 pages, and the entire setting is an enormous city. It has a huge spire towering over the city with many adventure settings inside, and a huge system of underground caverns for dungeon delving. Although there’s mentions of the lands outside of the city in the book, most of it concerns the city itself. We spent three plus years of weekly play and only left the city twice, for less than a session each time. We had all types of adventures, from delving to undersea to city social encounters, and the story never got boring. I felt that I could have started another campaign in Ptolus the next week and played for another three years without repeating any story elements.
Our Ptolus campaign was set in the city, but much of the story we created was our own. The main Ptolus book contains a series of short adventures, and there are supplements that contain adventure arcs for various levels. We didn’t use any of these adventures, we created our own stories (with one partial exception I’ll get into later). I would estimate that 40% of our stories came from the book, and 60% was homebrewed. Here are many people and places that came from the book, but I changed how they were used to fit our story. In this way I felt the freedom to create scenarios to fit our group.
How it Started
The players were able to use most any 5.14 D&D character options. I told them that we’d start with the characters arriving in Ptolus from their homelands, with the option of being a native of Ptolus if it made more sense for their characters. The players had ideas about what areas they would come from, and each threw out ideas for how and why they came to Ptolus. Together we decided that the harengon (rabbit person) druid character was asked by her tribal leader to go to Prolus to oversee a funerary ritual for an NPC. She was accompanied by a minotaur fighter from her tribe who served as a sort of bodyguard. They met a litorian (lion person) fighter looking for adventure who accompanied them and met a half-elf bard at the gates of the city who sought a story to write and immediately identified the druid as a hero he could write about, and the party entered the city.
As a GM I had created ideas for the first session or two. They’d meet a few NPCs who knew the deceased, a Cleric who would serve as a mentor. They would find a fight at the funeral and run across an evil druid who served as an assistant to a necromancer. Dealing with the evil druid took 3 sessions, and in the end the group chased him from the city, and took his house as a headquarters, deciding to stay in Ptolus. I hadn’t prepared any further than this when we began, trusting in the natural evolution of emergent story, and the enormous depth of lore in the Ptolus book. I should mention that I’d skimmed through the book, reading deeper into some parts than others, but I by no means knew all the details by heart. My advice is to read what you need to begin having fun and don’t be intimidated by the length of the book.
GM Thoughts: Losing the Plot
We played the campaign for a long time before a main story arc emerged. I would put out plot threads and see what the players latched onto and build adventures from there. This usually worked but occasionally I felt that the players were overwhelmed with plot threads and didn’t know what they “should” do. Of course they could do whatever they want, but my players fall somewhere between linear and sandbox campaigners – they like having freedom to explore but can get overwhelmed without a clear story. After a few months of play they met a wealthy dwarf who hired them to follow a magic map he had that he believed led to an ancient artifact his family has been looking for for centuries. The map was a series of symbols, so they’d figure out what each meant one at a time. After a few sessions I think the players felt a bit bored by the path so I introduced a rival NPC party who the wealthy dwarf had also hired to follow the map, as he was getting impatient. It gave the players some drive to not get bested by this NPC group, although the players could abandon the quest at any time, if they were truly bored by it. At the close of the quest the PCs found the wealthy dwarf had been assassinated, and the twist was he’d left his estate to the PCs. This led to a lot of questions from the PCs, and if they wanted to explore the dwarf’s library or journals they could find many interesting ties in the city. There were tomes of history for the bard, notes about ancient fiends for the fighters, and even a mystical ancient tree in a secret room in the basement, for the druid.
The PCs were 6th level after about 10 months when I felt they were lost without a story, and began to feel lost myself to maintain interest. I decided to “look for help from others” by using the published Ptolus adventure The Night of Dissolution. The beginning of the adventure is a decent sized castle/dungeon exploration called Pythoness House. The castle is 8 levels tall and another subterranean layer below. I was concerned about the size of this castle as my players aren’t generally excited by large dungeon crawls. I set up the adventure so that when the PCs completed the first layer, they would know that what they were looking for was in the dungeon below, but that there were many levels to explore above if they wanted to explore.
The PCs ended up clearing the first floor and proceeding to head to the basement, where difficult traps and combats awaited. They survived with the item they were looking for and a confrontation with cultists as they left Pythoness House. The PCs then were asked to search for a young man abducted by the cult and successfully free Iltumar Shon, a key character from The Night of Dissolution. After successfully freeing Shon, I felt that the players had enough plot threads that they were interested in, so they weren’t “lost”. I gave up on the rest of the Night of Dissolution adventure. Interestingly Iltumar Shon played a part in the rest of our campaign but in a completely different way than he did in the published adventure.
Our Story Highlights
The Rival NPCs
Previously I’d mentioned that the PCs had encountered a rival NPC party while following a magic map. That NPC party consisted of: Iz-Ukara, a tiefling monk who was overly aggressive at times, N.T. Jimenez, a tortle wizard who thought she was a pirate and cast spells with her cutlass which was really a magic wand, Frod, a dwarf barbarian they’d met in their first session, and Saradore, a dwarf cleric who was Frod’s wife (Frod and Saradore perpetually bickered.) The NPCs would continue to appear throughout the campaign, with the PCs even hiring them as hirelings to take care of lesser tasks. Although they often served as comedic relief due to their personalities, they did act in the story, at times becoming key NPCs.
One key adventure in the campaign, a dangerous fight on a ship, had the NPCs show up late in the battle to help the PCs. They didn’t save the day, as I think it’s important that the player characters drive the story, but they can help. This also shows the growth as the PCs were beginning to doubt that their hirelings served any purpose.
Destroying the Noble District
The heroes were following a lead that led them high into the Spire above Ptolus where they ended up travelling and exploring an extra-dimensional space. They’d previously heard rumors and stories of a demon lord named Ex-Lor the Cruel who was lurking in the shadows. The heroes succeeded in their battle in the Spire, but when they emerged they found that a year had passed while they were in the extra-dimensional space for a few days, and Ex-Lor had destroyed the entire Nobles district of the city and taken control of the city.
The heroes spend the next dozen or more sessions looking for and eventually defeating Ex-Lor. Along the way they find that Ex-Lor has enacted harsh rules banning tieflings and many hybrid races such as minotaur, centaurs and litorians. The heroes find fighting and hatred in the streets as some segment of the population adopts bigotry and taunt and bully races they see as “other”.
The events described above are one of the major ways that our Ptolus differs from most, as the Noble district and most of the Noble families are destroyed. Later the ancient dwarf city of Dwarvenhearth is magically rebuilt in the area of the Noble district, which is again vastly different than in most Ptolus campaigns. For some this would seem “wrong”, but we embraced this in a sort of “let’s see what happens” way.
Mass Combat
Two years into our campaign (in real time) the PCs were tasked with defending the city from an invading barbarian horde. At the time they were level 14. The horde was foreshadowed for a long time from tales of people from other regions who travelled to the city. I spent a lot of time researching various mass combat systems in 5e, and there are many that are very good. I had two goals for this large scale combat (aside from making it a challenging session):
- The barbarian hordes were mainly made up of a huge army of indistinct warriors, but the army the PCs had assembled to defend the city was made up of many different types of fighters (elves, dragons, dwarves, a band of wizards, a group of druids, etc.)
- The victory or defeat of the PCs and their allies should be largely influenced by the player characters.
The horde were led by 5 high CR demonic creatures, so that the PCs would have individual battles to fight. After the PC’s round of combat, we would switch to a round of a group of PC allies fighting a group of invaders. Each player had control of two allied groups, who had a few options of attack and then made a single roll against the invader’s roll, with each group losing an appropriate amount of strength. The PCs survived their individual battles, although a few PCs went to death throws and were saved by the two druids. It was fun and ran pretty smoothly. You can read the details here.
Time Travel
Chaositech is an important part of the lore of Ptolus. It’s described as not magic nor technology, but somewhere in between, with some of the explanation left to the GM. The characters found several items of chaositech in our campaign, including one called “The Child of the Shell” – a golden turtle shaped idol that lets you see through time, and with practice, travel through time. Generally speaking I think that introducing time travel into your fantasy campaign is not a good idea. I didn’t do this with a lot of forethought regarding how it would play out, I really was curious about what would happen. I had faith that if things got out of control I would be able to improv something to bring the story back in.
The interesting part of this for me was that the players really didn’t like the idea much. They used the item very few times over the next couple of years of the campaign, perhaps twice. I didn’t mind that at all, I hadn’t planned how the item would be used in the story, I was curious how it would play out. This seemed to be a preference of the players, whether that was because they thought it made their characters too powerful, or just that they didn’t like time travel in fantasy.
GM Thoughts: Running 5e for Higher Level Characters
Four of the players in this campaign had played with me in a previous 5e campaign where their characters were very powerful in combat. In this campaign I found early on (around 5th or 6th level) that these characters were ok in combat, but not terribly strong. Whether that was intentional or accidental I don’t know, but it was interesting. In some ways the characters weren’t built optimally (which I’m fine with) and the party make up wasn’t optimal (Fighter/Wizard, Bard, Warlock, and two Druids). The characters were still able to succeed in dangerous quests, but it did change the way I looked at plot threads I gave them. I set up situations where the characters didn’t have to be epic warriors but could succeed as field generals, as I mentioned in the above mass combat.
By the time the characters were above 15th level though, the mechanics of 5e took over and I found that the PCs were very capable in combat, even if some players would think the PCs were not optimal builds. At this time I made sure that the PCs had challenging individual combats as well as being leaders. The progression from aspiring adventurers to epic heroes was an enduring theme, as the characters saw they were known by citizens who they’d never met, as their city saving heroics made them into celebrities. My favorite scene in the whole campaign was later in the campaign when they were confronted with decisions about how to save the city and the world from an apocalypse and the NPC who had served as their mentor since the first episode turned to the heroes and asked, “What should we do?” The players were caught off guard as they were confronted with the realization that they were a higher level, and higher in influence, than their mentor.
The End
When the characters were 17th level an apocalyptic event, The Night of Dissolution occurred, freeing thousands of evil spirits and 99 fiend lords known as Galchutt. Not that there is an excellent adventure set in Ptolus that deals with The Night of Dissolution, but I didn’t use that module’s plot. Instead I used the ideas of the event to create an epic finale. The PCs spent several months battling powerful Galchutt until they finally confronted the leader of the Galchutt, Mephistopheles. He had shown up many times, at first as a strange seemingly harmless uncle-style figure.
One premise that the Ptolus setting uses is that Praemus, the creator god, long ago created a “prison wall”, a barrier that trapped all of the planet inside. This kept the evil Galchutt from escaping into the universe, but it also meant that the mortals of the earth were trapped with these evil entities, effectively making a prison of the world.
The heroes ended up with a artifact that let them choose to either open the barrier wall to let the fiends escape (hopefully to leave the earth), or use the artifact to render the fiends mortal, and fight them (hopefully killing them). In the end I’d foreshadowed Mephistopheles enough that the players and characters hated him, so that when the time to choose came they took the chance to fight him, which was very difficult, but they did win.
The Characters
Here are the characters from our campaign and an interesting thing about them.
- Bright, a Harengon Druid. As Bright became more powerful she often chose necromantic spells, so she could use animated skeletons and such in fights. Necromancy isn’t illegal in the city, but some of the more popular churches regard any necromancy as evil, which Bright confronted from time to time. Bright was always a good character, using necromancy to help her friends and their quests. Later in the campaign as the characters came up against powerful fiends, I realized that some of the choices Bright made mirrored the path an early bad guy named Reggred took, who was a druid who turned to necromancy for nefarious purposes. I had a Galchutt, Asase-Ya, the demigod of death, confront Bright telling Bright that she had set the path that Reggred took to make him her servant, but Reggred failed. Asase-Ya then set the path that Bright ok, and she greeted Bright as her new servant. This was of course not true, Bright made her own choices for good reasons, but bad guys lie. I like to create encounters where players get to make important role playing choices.
- Dre, a Litorian Fighter/Wizard. This character had minimal backstory going into the campaign (I’m fine with as much or as little backstory as the player wants to create.) At one point exploring underground Dre wanted to see what he could determine from the stone hallway they were in. I asked for an Intelligence (investigation) check. As there was no reason to think Dre knew anything about stonework, I thought that he wouldn’t learn anything unless he rolled a 20. Dre did roll a natural 20. So I used that result, gave him the information, and outside of the game I asked “why?”. I suggested to the player that in his early life in his litorian tribe he had a friend who was a dwarf and he learned a lot about dwarf life from him. The player was ok with this, and that led to a dwarf NPC who came to Ptolus and would come up often, which eventually led to the story of the dwarf city of Dwarvenhearth being magically rebuilt in Ptolus with Dre’s friend as its leader.
- Hazel, a Firbolg Druid. While in a large dungeon crawl, she used Geas on a D’Stradi demon (similar to a cambion). When the characters left, the demon was freed and she told Hazzel that she couldn’t come with them, as she knew at her core it was the Geas spell that forced her to befriend Hazel, it wasn’t the demon’s choice. Later a Galchutt killed the D’Stradi and possessed her body to try to trick Hazel. After the characters killed the Galchutt they buried the D’Stradi’s body in their garden, and the other druid, Bright, sprinkled some mystic seeds they found in the garden. At the close of the campaign the heroes found that the seeds raised the D’Stradi as a human, and she and Hazel were reunited.
- Maziem, a Tiefling Wizard. Maziem used the Simulacrum spell to create a duplicate (named Meizam). During the time that Ex-Lor ruled the city, Meizam took over a rebel group seeking to overthrow the tyrannical government. The player who created Maziem left the campaign, and I talked with her about her characters being NPCs going forward, which she was fine with. The PC Maziem became the head of a wizard’s guild and was consulted occasionally. The simulacrum Meizam continued as a (somewhat fanatical) rebel leader, coming into conflict with the PCs. this was fun as it was not an epic fight that happened and was done, but roleplaying conflicts where Maziem disagreed with what was best for the city.
- Skarr, a Minotaur Fighter/Rogue and Sir Baldrin, a Dwarf Warlock. These were both played by the same player. After about two years of playing Skarr, the player mentioned that he felt he had done as much as he could with Skarr and he thought a different character might fit the party and story better. Skarr became a celestial warrior for a Solar that the party had interacted with, and Sir Baldrin entered the campaign with the mass combat, which involved armies of dwarves. I think that being flexible enough to allow players to play a character they’re comfortable with is important, and the player was fine allowing some of my ideas about what would happen to his old character as an NPC. It’s this type of compromise that really helps games work.
- Stray, a Half-Ef Bard. Stray was a writer/historian bard who adopted the goal of documenting the story of Bright the Druid, who he thought of as the epic hero. The player personified this throughout the campaign, even as Stray became more powerful. The character did use many powerful spells which helped the combat, but the character always acted as if it was the others who were the true heroes. I made sure to have NPCs refer to him as a hero so that he would occasionally have to confront the idea in roleplay.
Whew – that one was long, but thanks for skimming and/or reading! Let me know what you think below!
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