I haven't run Shackled City, so I can't give you specific advice. But I can say that I own Midnight Syndiate's D&D CD, which is excellent, and definitely better for your run of the mill fantasy game sessions than their other, more gothic horror sounding CDs.
I use the Midnight Syndicate songs pretty heavily. Different songs fit perfectly for different situations such as battles, stealth missions, dungeon crawls etc.
I would advise making heavy use of instrumental pieces with lots of emotion. It creates more drama and if you associate a song as an NPC's 'theme' it makes them seem cooler and more important.
Recently I've been using songs by Nightwish a lot. They are great.
I played around with music a bit for SCAP. In the end I stuck with the traditional music:
Fantasy movie soundtracks such as:
* LOTR soundtrack
* most of the Conan stuff
* Willow (I think)
Some more mainstream music such as
* Vangellis (conquest of paradise is great)
* celtic music from the dime rack
* mood music (sounds of the forest, ocean waves, that sort of thing)
the trick is to sort music into different playlists. You could have a playlist for Cauldron (city sounds etc), for the outdoors, for dungeons and caves, for combat etc.
That should have you pretty much covered for 90% of your gaming needs.
good luck.
Gladiator soundtrack is good.
We use tons of music for our campaigns - and Shackled City is no exception.
So far (off the top of my head) we've used music from:
- Suikoden III (Cauldron city music)
- Final Fantasy VI (Jzadirune)
- Final Fantasy VII (Malachite Hold music)
- Soulcalibur III (fight with Kazmojen)
- Semper Fidelis (Sousa) - a parade for the Stormblades
- Willow (fight at the Lucky Monkey)
I'm at the office so I don't have my notes with me, but there's much more as the AP continues.
Forget the soundtracks...
I recently saw a group play at a medieval fair and they were just perfect. The group is called Jagabab, just really great stuff, very emotive.
http://www.jagabab.cz/home_eng.html
If you can get your hands on a CD, your problem of finding background music for your campaign are over.
Here are a few good sample tracks;
http://www.myspace.com/jagabab
Tell me that isn't just perfect!!! Their Latin songs are just great. The Czech and Slovak stuff sounds great too, and most people never realize what language they're listening to anyway, but the Latin just feels really authentic to me.
I like to combine a couple of soundtracks. The tone I will be aiming for in Shackled City is captured by these two. I go with Tyler Bates' score for 300 and pair it with Hans Zimmer's score for Black Hawk Down. Both work excelent.
I also have extensively used Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill scores, mostly 3 and 4 though 1, 2 and the movie are all excellent. Hans Zimmer's Pirates of the Caribbean scores (Dead Man's Chest and At World's End) are great background for D&D as well as Marco Beltrami's Hellboy score.
I have included, to a limited effectiveness, Mozart's Requiem Mass, and the work of Richard Wagner. The music of Enigma, any CD, can add some great ethereal music to a game.
I've just been looking for some soundtracks for the final battle between the PCs and adimarchus. I've got to say that anything by James Horner, Hans Zimmer or John Williams is dead on.
They've made some of the best movie soundtracks ever. I think I'll be going with the apropriately named duel of fates (from the Fantom Menace soundtrack) for this battle. with some build-up music by some of the other composers
For any fantasy games, I use these:
John Williams and Julian Bream.
Kodo.
For classical music, I love to use Grieg and Mussorgsky.
Grieg .
I would be interested to know what other people use in their games. '
Please post here.
I just started a thread with specific event/songs. It's here.
I like to use video game music in my games, as it tends to be a little less recognizable than a lot of movie music. Not all, obviously, but the last thing you want is to ruin a great scene because the players are all too busy looking around for Darth Vader because you're playing something well-known from Star Wars.
Final Fantasy: Advent Children has some great songs that would fit a wide range of scenes. As far as video games go, the Silent Hill series has a wide selection of creepy atmospheric music, as would Resident Evil I'm guessing. Devil May Cry games have fast-paced speed-metalish stuff for action scenes.
The PS2 game Stella Deus also has amazing music, and a huge track list too.
The PS2 game Stella Deus also has amazing music, and a huge track list too.
Indeed. Hitoshi Sakimoto (Stella Deus, along with FFXII, FF Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Ogre Battle, Radiant Silvergun, and more) is great for music during a game.
You listed many great choices.
The Conan the Barbarian soundtrack is the best soundtrack for fantasy gaming ever, in my opinion.