Drink Talk Roll Extended #7: Raiders of the Lost Archives

Session Recap

After defeating the gnolls with the help of Nallah “Skybreaker” and the rest of the Skybreaker Tribe (They’re named after her not the other way around) and negotiating for better pay, the party rested up and kept on going to Shunil. Jedah spent some time among the tribe sampling their foods for his own inspiration and Khorr won some respect by being able to stomach oosquai. They parted ways with the tribe not long before entering Shunil and then moved on to looking for a way to enter the archives.

After trying to walk in, they learned they would need sponsorship from a high-ranking merchant, noble or government official. Amra tried strongarming a shop owner into sponsoring them, but Ulrich, and surprisingly Jedah, realized that might not be the best idea in an upscale neighborhood. It was actually Khorr who through his own means managed to find someone who could get them in: A woman named Talliyah. She and Khorr are affiliated somehow and after listening to his request, she was able to get him in the door. According to the guards at the front of the archives, she seems to be an agent of some state but the party never asked too many questions.

Once inside, the party started researching. Khorr found a librarian to help him find books on gemology and found some interesting historical bits relating to the Gaiun Empire and how its sacred crown supposedly had four similar looking gems that were lost after a battle that precipitated the end of the empire. Jedah, continuing his newfound streak of sensibility, decided to look up Orcish cooking methods and started reading a book detailing the cuisine of the Menagi Desert all while keeping Amra from causing too much trouble with a literal gun to his head.

Ulrich probably would have studied something, but his patron called him into a meeting with another one of her agents. His patron was wondering why Ulrich was hanging around with two creations of the Winter Lady Mab’s creations and a halfling that seemed to have blurred the line between life and death one too many times. With a few smooth words, Ulrich was able to convince the other agent that he was being proactive and keeping an eye on them. She told him to keep doing that but that their patron would be contacting him again in the near future with new orders.

While taking a break from his research, Khorr notices that the Earth Topaz he was wearing had started to glow and as he moved around the library, the brightness changed. He quickly determined that the closer he go to the top of the stairs, the brighter it glowed and decided to climb up to the second floor. At the top of the staircase, the gem seemed to reach full brightness revealing a door hidden in the wall. He quickly gathered his fellow party members and showed them this and together they headed toward the other side.

Have they entered the temple of doom? Is this their last crusade? Find out next time on Drink Talk Roll!

It’s (Third) Party Time!

So, let’s say you decided to run a D&D campaign for your friends and/or acquaintances. Maybe it’s a biweekly streamed game for a small internet channel. Maybe that feels like you need to have maps and stuff ready for each session but first party products don’t have everything to need. What is this hypothetical DM to do?  

Okay, it’s me. I’m that DM. You knew that already. I’m talking third party supplements this week. The easiest one for me to recommend is maps. The internet is filled with thousands upon thousands of maps people have made and shared for you to use. Sometimes, I even plan adventures based on a basic idea and whatever map I can find that kind of fits it. Whenever I do something like this, I do my best to leave the creator’s mark visible at least on Roll20. I’m not sure how much it will be visible on stream because I don’t control that window but the big one to check out is Czpeku. Cze and Peku make amazing maps and I’ve used them multiple times in past campaigns. Other places to check out would be r/battlemaps and similar subreddits.

Other times, I’ll just take the best fitting map I can find from my collection of maps from adventures and random books I’ve gotten over the course of oh so many Humble Bundles. The Archives from this episode are actually one of those maps that looked sufficiently library-like. Sometimes, like with the Temple of the Sun and Moon from session 1, I also make small changes to make the maps fit what’s happening in the session. In that case, it was hiding the cave in the back behind a fake grid so I could reveal it on stream. 

If you’re playing in person and have the PDFs for those books/adventures, you might just be able to print those maps out and place them on whatever surface you use for your games. If you’re on a VTT like we do, some packages come with separate maps files but if they don’t, you can try opening the PDF in your viewer of choice and see if you can copy the image and save it to its own file or screenshot it. Worse comes to worst, you can use it as reference and just draw it in your VTT of choice.  

And that’s just maps. There are third party options galore for magic items, character options and monsters and just about every other aspect of your favorite TTRPG. Some of my favorites are the character options and monsters from Kobold Press and MCDM Productions. Both of those studios are also working on their own TTRPGs and I’m looking forward to those. Jedah is also using the Gunslinger archetype from Matt Mercer for Critical Role fame. I have so much third-party stuff that I wish the players would look into more.  Maybe in the future.

Speaking of future, that’s my time for this week. Maybe some time in the future, I’ll dive deeper into some of my favorite third-party projects. Until then, keep on rolling.

-J.D.