I’ve always been a fan of the immersion factor that music and sound bring to TTRPGs. I have fond memories from the olden times of collecting sound effect CDs from the Halloween store to use as background ambience for dungeon-crawling sessions (and then probably going through far too much effort trying to make the setting and the encounters at least sort of match the audio). Granted, those weren’t always the best—if you’ve never had the pleasure of engaging in a tense roleplaying session that keeps getting interrupted by random screams and cackling like an extra in a rubber clown mask at a third-tier state fair funhouse, you’re missing out—but fortunately, the breadth and quality of available sound and ambience options have come a long way since then.
Music is the same way. When you’re sitting around the table and your GM hits play on something from the “Conan the Barbarian” soundtrack, you know it’s time for some bad guys to get sworded and/or sorceried. When you hear that Shire theme from the “Lord of the Rings” soundtrack, you know you’re about to enter a pastoral little hamlet full of relatable NPCs that your GM will make you fall in love with before shamelessly brutalizing and/or endangering them to raise the emotional stakes. There’s a track on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” soundtrack that I’ll always associate with a particularly nail-biting combat against a BBEG (more than I associate it with the movie itself) just because it happened to come on at exactly the right time.
Anyway, where was I going with this? If you read the final paragraph of our Season of Ghosts blog last week, you may have caught our announcement that Paizo has officially partnered with Michael Ghelfi Studios—one of the industry’s leading producers of music and audio specifically tailored for TTRPGs—to produce original music for select and upcoming Pathfinder Adventure Paths! You can go check out our official Season of Ghosts Adventure Path trailerfeaturing a taste of that music, and download the first track—aptly titled “Season of Ghosts”—absolutely free, right here!
Well, I’m excited to announce that our next two Adventure Paths—Seven Dooms for Sandpoint and Wardens of Wildwood—will both receive full-length soundtrack albums of their own, which we hope to release alongside the first volume of each Adventure Path so that you can use it to set the stage for your adventures from day one. Each album is being created completely from scratch by a member of Michael Ghelfi’s award-winning team of composers, working from input provided by each Adventure Path’s lead developer on key themes, inspirations, major characters, and story beats. It’s our hope that, not only will this awesome music enhance your games today, but that years from now you’ll be able to listen to a track from one of these albums and immediately associate it with a memorable NPC or moment from your own campaign, much as I associate this track with the time my character critically fumbled and accidentally dropped his weapon off the side of a boat.
We’ll be offering each of these albums as complete downloads on the Paizo store, and shortly after release, they’ll also be available on Michael Ghelfi Studios’ Bandcamp, Spotify, Opus, YouTube, and probably anywhere else you like to purchase digital music. Oh, and just because we think it’s cool, we’ll also be including the complete Seven Dooms for Sandpoint album with the adventure module for Foundry VTT, all cued up and ready to score your valiant attempts to save Sandpoint from utter destruction.
And there’s more on the way! We can’t share all of our plans just yet, but we can heavily insinuate that we don’t plan on stopping here. Watch this space!
Andrew White
Digital Products Lead
Paizo Partners with Michael Ghelfi Studios
Thursday, February 15, 2024
