The Soundtrack To Your RPG
Here is my list of inspirational music for writing and running games.
Most RPGs “require” music in the background.
Since playing online, this has become difficult, due to audio issues, the need to hear people more clearly, as the music plays directly in your ears instead of surrounding the one room we are all sitting in.
But when our games are at the table, the soundtrack is surprisingly important, especially to the game I run, my players have come to expect a killer soundtrack to come with it.
Once again I preface this article by saying just because your game doesn’t use music to any extent other than to be on in the background, that doesn’t make your game worse, it just makes mine more pretentious.
I try and score our table-top games as a film composer would score a movie, with leitmotifs, themes and tracks.
I try to make each of these things identifiable in my games.
Locations - with a certain sound, a specific couple of tracks.
NPCs - with a single track.
Specific brackets of play, such as a battle, with a playlist. This goes for exploration, skirmish, murder mystery, dungeon crawl, etc.
Factions with a certain sound, a Kingdom has a theme, a Religious Cult has a theme, the Wizard Cabal has their theme.
PCs - with a specific track. This is much trickier as the PCs might have their own opinion on this. Either you ask them for a specific piece of music that they envision the character with, or you choose one and trust your instincts. I go with the second option because I have a “wealth of listening experience” with film and classical music that my players just don’t have. I am a freak with this type of music, I know at 0.32 seconds begins a certain leitmotif I want and at 2.12 the track gets a bit too loud and jars with the tone I was trying to create, so I skip the track at 2.11.
Artefact - usually MacGuffins are integral to the plot of D&D games in some way. So sometimes I give a very powerful item a theme. Just like when you hear in Lord of the Rings, the Ring has its own theme that plays when someone is tempted by its power.
Don’t want use all of that list?
Then don’t!
Maybe select a theme for the main MacGuffin of your campaign and the villain. This will already elevate your campaign in a way the players will never forget.
Example Of Using Music In Play
To encompass all in one example, I will take my fairytale-labyrinthine forest, The Deepfell, and what happens there.
The Player Characters journey on foot into the dark twisted forest. The air is alive with dancing butterflies that illuminate in faerie colours. They are searching for the Pool of Comprehension.
I play Gelfling Ruins by Trevor Jones, it kickstarts a fey-like and journeying atmosphere.
To make sure that I don’t have to pay attention to the music as I describe things, I have already added the same song to the queue once or twice. Next up on the queue are the tracks The Armour by Jerry Goldsmith, The Goblins by Jerry Goldsmith, both add an underlying tension to the faerie forest.
They’re trekking through, bypassing a ruined statue of the Antlered King that is crumbled and covered in moss. They spot a magic stream that glows and they decide to drink from it.
They are attacked by harpies that were nesting in the trees, they screech to protect the stream, which they jealously guard.
I don’t want a war track, I want a skirmish track, and the fight is not overly epic in scale, so I select my skirmish playlist, which might have a few tracks from Skyrim by Jeremy Soule such as Blood and Steel, Caught Off Guard, Steel on Steel andTooth & Claw.
They defeat the harpies, and journey on, following the stream. They think it might lead into the pool they are searching for.
Journeying there, they are stopped by a talking serpent that is coiled around a tree branch. This is a specific NPC that they will meet again, she has her own track which should be memorable to the PC and will be played each time they meet her.
I play The Cheshire Cat by Danny Elfman. It is menacing at points, yet soothing at others, and still fairytale.
The faerie serpent points them towards the Pool of Comprehension.
They walk there, one of the PCs excelled in the conversation with the serpent, tricking it to give up the information, so they are rewarded and their theme plays. Let’s say the character is a religious paladin who against character used deception (his high charisma). Burning the Past by Harry Gregson Williams plays. It has heroic yet religious overtones.
They reach the Pool of Comprehension and notice symbols of an evil cult are scratched into the bark of the trees around it, and a dark hooded necromancer stands at the other side of the pool in a mist.
I select the theme they already know for this order, Lord of Light by Ramin Djawadi. It is dark and evil. The same leitmotif appears in a few tracks from Game of Thrones, of Melisandre and the Red Cult, so I have all of those queued.
The players end up diving into the Pool of Comprehension and finding a Crystal Ball at the bottom. This magic item will become important to the plot and so I play Holy Grail/Finale by Miklos Rozsa.
This is a basic example of what I might do in play. It doesn’t require much thinking for me anymore as I know the location, I know the NPCs, I know my music. I have them all prepared before the session. It took me about 5-10 minutes.
It will seem daunting to any new time Dungeon Masters reading this, and the only advice that exists for this is that it develops over time. I have been running D&D for 11 years for most weeks in those years and dozens of campaigns. I’ve been listening to film music, game music and classical music for all of that time.
How Most Groups Play
Most groups play with a soundtrack or “normal music” playing in the background and no attention to it.
I sometimes run games like this too!
Do I always prepare my music in that obsessive way?
No.
Sometimes I just select a playlist and let it run, skipping tracks that are out of tone with what is happening. Great scores for this are Skyrim, The Witcher 3 and Lord of the Rings. They have plenty of “ambient” tracks that don’t spoil any mood.
On nights where the game is more chilled, we’re eating pizza, we’re doing down- time activities, nothing major in the story is happening, I don’t need to set an atmosphere of dread or expectation - I stick albums by Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Rush, or just the soundtrack from a specific film on shuffle.
What about special sounds that aren’t music?
This is an article about music but of course I will mention that I intersperse my games with a specific sound effects sometimes. I select crackling fire if they’re gathered around a campfire, bells when the wedding ceremony is about to take place, bird sounds and the river rushing when they are out in nature etc.
I use these sparingly and sometimes they can be better than music to get the right tone, especially with cold settings I have found. The whistling wind and harsh snows echoing around the room gets everyone in the right frame of mind.
You can find all sorts of soundboards online, whole websites are dedicated to these ambient background noises, even for RPG sounds specifically, smithies, dungeons, jungles etc.
Also YouTube has a plethora of material. Just search and select what fits for your game.
This all sounds so time consuming?
If you use music like I use it, WITHOUT PREPARING, and are constantly looking for the right track whilst your players are roleplaying or in a fight, this will inevitably drag the whole game to a standstill.
It comes with practice. You have your playlist, you know your artists/composers, you know your NPCs and your world, then it will flow much easier.
Alternatively just create dozens of playlists with an exhaustive supply of music one time and never worry about your music in a game ever again.
Different Game Masters, different styles, it doesn’t matter, as long as your players can feel the music is heightening their experience (and are having fun, that is a must).
It also helps that I listen to this music for enjoyment.
I don’t search for RPG battle music. I listen to film and game scores constantly. So it takes most people a long time to search around a genre they don’t love, they know Hans Zimmer and John Williams, and that’s it, but if you were to ask them about 80s Hip-Hop they’d know heaps more than I do.
The list at the bottom may help you in your quest for RPG music.
Where did it begin?
I think the seeds of this musical tradition comes from when my Dad would play ambient metal albums during our first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign, when I was 11 years old.
He would just press play and it would roll through to the end of the album, then he’d stick the next CD in. Sometimes the guitar would be roaring when we were talking to some nuns in a sauna or some other kooky shit my Dad is brilliant at.
I loved it, I love the style of game my Dad runs, and the music fit. But I was subconsciously and then consciously searching for more when it came to my games.
I wanted nuns-in-a-sauna-music when we were talking to the nuns-in-a-sauna (I promise you there is a track out there that captures that). This obsessive search is just my style of running the game.
When I was younger I even created some of my own music for my D&D games, using my computer and keyboards and so forth. The result was mostly terrible as I have no music training, only what my ear is trained to like.
I mainly created synth ambient sounds, tracks I called Planar Gate, Awe of the Underdark and Humanity. This really does take too much time... and I want to be a writer not a musician. I’ll leave the music making to others.
Conclusion
Use music how you will. This is just a different example to the ones I see out there in the roleplaying corners of the internet and other peoples’ game tables.
This is only how I do it.
The happy medium will always work best. Take some inspiration from this article and the list below, but don’t go crazy with the music unless you are inspired to AND your players enjoy it.
The middle ground is finding a balance between obsessively searching for three minutes for one song during play, and on the other hand having heavy metal music play when you’re chilling with some nuns in a sauna. The balance is where the sweet spot usually is.
Less effort but a more engaging game.
“You wrench the underground portcullis open with the lever. You all enter the dark crypt...
“The tomb is a coated with black sand. There are gems scattered around the sand, dug in a strange pattern, a spiral. A sword glimmers with starlight, sticking out of the sand like Excalibur from the stone...”
“Dibs on the sword, bitches,” says one player, interrupting my perfectly crafted description.
I continue describing.
“Hundreds of platinum pieces vibrate and shake amongst the sands. Figurines of animals lie chipped and battered...”
“Dibs on the figurines of wondrous power, they’re mine. I hardly have any magic items,” interrupts another player.
I continue.
“In the centre of all of this, is a skull, with two emeralds for eyes, sharp diamonds for teeth and a gold crown that gleams greedily on its head...”
“I bet that fucker is a Demi-Lich!”
(I reach to my iPod to press play on a track...)
“I bet Dom plays that bloody undead song. What’s it called?”
“Funeral of Ablarbaratep or some other shit...”
“FUNERAL OF AMENHOTEP THE THIRD, PEASANTS!” I shout!
Funeral of Amenhotep the Third by Phillip Glass begins blasting out from the speakers and the Crusaders of Calin-Dor do battle with the Demi-Lich...
Here’s the list of inspirational music again, to save you scrolling back up to the top!