Drink, Talk, Roll Extended #0: Welcome to Arretin!

Welcome to Drink, Talk, Roll Expanded! I’m going to try and make this a biweekly series on the off weeks of DTR giving some more information about the world and events in the game as well as how I prepared for the session and created things.  I hope you enjoy it and find it useful for your own games.

Session Zero

​So, last week was our Session Zero. For those that don’t know, Session Zero is a discussion of the content of and expectations for the campaign before it officially starts. This may be a formal precampaign session where everyone gets together to as we did, or may be done just as much over text chats and private messages as we also did. 

Before the stream we had already worked to pick out a campaign, establish the tone for it (a bit on the serious side but a decent amount of silliness), and make sure some of the darker topics I expect to cover like body horror and human experimentation were okay with the players. These are all points that I feel every session zero should cover especially the discussion of possibly disturbing topics. While you may want to dig into darker things especially if you want to run a horror campaign, you should never risk hurting or triggering your players by accidentally bringing up old trauma. There’s a lot more to say about Session Zero that has already been said by smarter people so I’m just going to point you to some of them. If you have Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, it also covers Session Zero starting on pg. 139. Now, onto the campaign world!

Hello, World!

This campaign is set in my homebrew world of Arretin (pronounced Air-uh-tin). It started as world building for a previous campaign I ran for a different group and I liked that so much I offered to run it for A-to-J as well. I may not have been thinking straight when I made that offer (and I’m the one here who doesn’t drink). I’ll just have to live with the consequences.

Arretin is roughly based on our world but is smaller and lacks continents equivalents to North and South America. The name of the world itself was the result of trying to come up with something like Pangaea which is roughly Greek of “all of the Earth”. I did a rough mental conversion of that to the Latin “Omniterra”, reversed it to “Arretinmo” and dropped off the last two letters to make it more pronounceable. That was actually my naming process for a lot of bits of the world. If a city the players visit is known as the “City of X”, there’s a decent chance I translated X into the language of the place that inspired the city, shifted things around to make it easier for me to pronounce and called it done. 
The players will be starting on the continent of Nuna, Arretin’s rough European equivalent, in the town of Erezel.  Sitting at the base of Mt. Risalah, Erezel is known as the “City of the Sun and Moon” because it is said that the God of the Sun, Soel, and the Goddess of the Moon, Larg, stepped into the Mortal Realm and began spreading life throughout the world. To honor the gods, the Temple of the Sun and Moon has been built into the side of Mt. Risalah and is considered a pilgrimage site for the devout of Soel and/or Larg. Despite this, Erezel itself has remained a rather small city mostly due to the surrounding mountains making expansion difficult and most passing through are content to visit the temple and head back home.

Erezel is inspired by Vale in the Golden Sun series of video games. The series was a big influence on this campaign and it only felt appropriate to start it in a similar location. Some of those influences, like the four gems the players will need to find and take to towers corresponding to the four classical elements and the magic weapons with special properties that replace critical hits, will be seen right away.  Some are more plot or area based so they won’t pop up until later. I hope you’ll keep watching to see them all.

Erezel and by extension, the opening of this campaign, was also inspired by the Emond’s Field from The Wheel of Time. The most obvious reference is that the name of the big inn the town has is called the Summerwine Inn after the Winespring Inn from the books.  The leader of the town is also named Brandon having taken over the duty from the last Elder Iordain (pronounced Your-Dane) Rigney as a reference to Brandon Sanderson finishing the series for original author Robert Jordan (real name James Rigney). There are lots of other references to the series but those are other stories for a different time. 

I remember reading the opening to the first book The Eye of the World almost a decade ago now (Have I mentioned how old this makes me feel?) and getting hooked in to the series. I’m hoping I can create that kind of opening for the players. I feel like any more might give too much away for people who have read the book so I’ll be back in two weeks to talk more about that.

Until next time, keep rolling.

-J.D.