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I received a comment about a week or two ago about finding sound effects that could be used to bring further ambiance to D&D sessions. My first thought was to search around for sources where I could find various sound effects that can be downloaded for free. Then another thought came to me: Why not look to our own hard-drives for material? And thus I started to look at the very games I have installed for material that can be used.

So, as a first part of this Pillaging Your Games For D&D Material series, I’ll show you how you can pull music and other sounds out of The Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion. If you’re looking to use the game for more than just its music and sounds, then I recommend taking a look at Bringing Your PC Games to the Paper & Pencil World.

Music
This is seriously the easiest to get to in Oblivion. Just go to where you have Oblivion installed (By default it’s C:\Program Files\Bethesda Softworks\Oblivion), go into the Data folder, and from there to the Music folder. You’ll find 5 folders, each for a different category of music. The music being split into Battle, Dungeon, Explore, and Public categories will make it easy to select the appropriate song for the situation. However, it’s always worth to give each one a good listen-through to make sure they fit whatever situations you plan to throw your players into.

Sound Effects, Ambient Effects, and Voices
Admittedly, this isn’t quite as easy as with grabbing the music for Oblivion. Fortunately, there are tools that make it easier. If you use the Oblivion Mod Manager to handle mods, then you’ll have the BSA Browser as well (at least if you have the latest version of the OBMM). Once you have the OBMM installed, it will associate BSA files with BSA Browser. All you need to do is just double-click on a BSA file you want to look at, and it will open it in BSA Browser.

One particular BSA file of note is the Sounds.bsa file. As the name suggests, this contains a myriad of sound and ambient effects that you can use for your D&D campaign. You can pick and choose files you want to extract, or you can go ahead and extract every single file, by just using the appropriate buttons. If you want a bit of voice acting as well, you may want to browse through the Voices1 and Voices2 BSA files. You can find all the BSA files for Oblivion in the Data folder where you have Oblivion installed.

Also, depending on what mods you may have installed, there may be a folder within the Oblivion Data folder named Sound. Go ahead and dig around that as well, and see if there’s anything you may want to use from it. Who knows what you may find?

More to Come!
Like I said earlier, this is only the first part of what I plan to be a series of posts. Two more games I plan to cover will be Neverwinter Nights and Unreal Tournament 2004. And there will be plenty more to come as well!