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Does anyone else listen to music during their games?
Do you have any album or suggestions on where to get music?
I would prefer streaming music but all suggestions are welcome.
On a whim I went to Pandora and typed in Basil Poledouris (Conan composer). So far nothing but pure role-playing gold has come up:
1. Conan the Barbarian: wheel of pain
2. Batman Dark knight
3. Braveheart
4. Aliens Film
5. Lord of the rings
The Gladiator Soundtrack is possibly the best collection of music I've ever used for gaming.
Nightwish is hit and miss, but they have some good tracks depending on the theme of your game.
I'll be playing the Jolly Rogers nonstop when I run Skull and Shackles.
I rolled up a tenth level halfling bard and brought my banjo with me to all of his sessions. Whenever the bard started his performance I started up a tune and played an inspirational instrumentals as background. On my turn I tried to sing his actions.
This is actually a lot clunkier than it sounds when you have to shuffle paperwork and dice rolling with your playing. The night it was the most fun is when I improvised a different theme for each character and played it on that character's turn. The DM had the spookiest one.
The Dirge of Doom can be fun when you're doing this, though.
If you need background for tribal dancing/human sacrifice type stuff, I recommend old school NoMeansNo.
It all depends on what kind of feeling you want to invoke. For large overbearing epic pieces you should check out Immediate music, Two-steps from hell, X-ray dog and Thomas Bergersen (all can be found on youtube). There are also plenty of good classical music like armina burana and toccata and fugue in d-minor.
For a more haunting , creepy dungeon crawl feeling dark ambient music like Akira Yamaoka, Shinjuku thief and Atrium Carceri is gold. You should also check out Nox Arcana which made the official 3rd edition soundtrack.
Check out various soundtracks from movies and video games, there are plenty of awesome gaming music out there. Some personal favorites from the top of my head: The music from King Arthur (atrocious movie, great music), Baldur's gate, Dragon age, Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, the Final fantasy games, Neverwinter nights, the music from the game Darksiders and probably dozens more I can't remember right now. Most of these can be found on youtube.
I rolled up a tenth level halfling bard and brought my banjo with me to all of his sessions. Whenever the bard started his performance I started up a tune and played an inspirational instrumentals as background. On my turn I tried to sing his actions.
I've thought of doing that with my penny whistle or dulcimer, but I'm too much of a munchkin to play a bard using a two-handed instrument. I suppose I need to learn slide whistle. :/
To address the original question, design a gunslinger-themed campaign and play lots of Ennio Morricone.
Always using music! I'll even put together different playlists on my pod for different encounters for our current session. That way if I have time beforehand to plan it out, I can throw in sound effects or what not in between tracks.
For example the last session the heroes were camped out & had divided up watches... After a short track (under a couple of minutes) I threw in some footsteps sound effects. So that after the PC rolled his perception I could simply turn it up.
Another idea I got from the boards was giving certain NPCs their own "theme song". So once it's played when the group interacts with them a couple of times. I'll throw that track into a playlist for Inn... or tavern. Now when the PCs hear the song they'll ask "Is (fill in the blank) here?"
"Why yes he is..... whatta coincidence."- Makes me smirk every single time
Music made some of my early sessions really memorable. Something low-key from samurai champloo is the only song I can remember being used, at one of our players behest.
But our main GM is vehemently against it, nowadays. He's a bit of a stick in the mud like that. :P
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We always use music. I have a BUNCH of great movie and TV soundtracks on CD. I went through and pulled the best tracks from them ALL and put those in iTunes. I then burned CDs (it's a 12 CD set) of those tracks - we put the CDs on random and it makes a GREAT backdrop for games!
I listed all the movie and TV soundtracks I have and use somewhere ... I'll see if I can find the thread ...
HERE it is.
FYI, here are the main soundtracks that make up the 12 disc set. By main, I mean there was a LOT of great stuff on these and I ended up choosing a significant number of tracks from each one. There are assorted single songs from a number of other soundtracks as well to round the collection out, but these CDs served as my primary sources:
Conan the Barbarian
Braveheart
The Cell
300
Lord of the Rings (all three)
Gladiator
Lost (TV show)
The DaVinci Code
King Kong (new one)
The Last of the Mohicans
Pirates of the Caribbean (all three)
Last of the Mohicans
Alexander
Kingdom of Heaven
King Arthur
The 13th Warrior
Excalibur
Troy
Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
Clash of the Titans
Prince of Persia
Robin Hood Prince of Thieves (Kevin Cosner version)
Robin Hood (new one)
Star Trek (new one)
The Tudors
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
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we almost always have music, but recently only through pandora. i'll just type in lord of the rings or gladiator or dark knight and it pulls down good enough music. I tried to be that DM that set up playlists for all different occasions and player themes and whatever, but it got to be a nuisance for me and my players never really seemed to care either way about it anyway. So it's pandora for us.
On a note about using video game music. This could be just because of the individual players I had, but it got to where I couldn't use video game music. Cause everytime a particular theme started, they would all stop playing and start chatting about that part of the game. WoW music was probably the worst to get them going. Morrowind & Oblivion, though AWESOME music, often invoked game stopping conversations as well.
Some gems I have discovered: (PS1 game) Nightmare Creatures the music is on the game disc. The interview with a vampire soundtrack as well.
The copy of the "The Witcher (tm)" that I bought came with a disc of all the music used in the game and its trailers. It's got some great tracks.
I'll have to follow up on some of those. Recently I've gotten some nice mileage out of the Dawn of War (2) soundtrack, but then again I was running Dark Heresy :) .
We listen to music all the time. We do a lot of game music. Oblivion/Morrowind/Nehrim/Guild Wars/Baulder's Gate/Neverwinter Nights/any other similar computer game.
For general background music we use the soundtracks from the Myst series of computer games. They're good because there are rarely sudden jumps in volume or tempo, which can often be distracting when deep in roleplay mode.
"The king quietly dips his head in sorrow, the loss of his kin to much too much to (BUMBADADA BOOM BAM BAM BAM TA DA!) SOMEONE TURN DOWN THAT MUSIC!"
The Arcanum soundtrack is also good, but is really heavy on the violin. You might use it for a particular town to give it a certain "vibe".
Midnight Syndicate unfortunately tends to have a lot of dips and rises of volume, but it does make for some good dungeon crawling background music.
Totally check out these two threads if you haven't already:
Thread 1: Ripetide777's EXPANSIVE creepy soundtrack listing
Thread 2: My thread on sinister soundtracks
I always use music in my games and even though a lot of the suggestions in the linked threads lean toward horror adventures, there's plenty for common use in them as well.
Newgrounds.com. Audio. Tons of user submitted stuff, some pretty epic. Has categories like Classic and Atmospheric where you can find great background stuff for pathfinder games.
Doom metal ... Earth, Old Man Gloom, some Oxbow. Slow heavy and atmospheric is usually good for the whole session. I used to try to have different music for multiple settings but lost more immersion from trying to find the "right" track than I gained from having music at all.
BTW much love for the music from Arcanum by Ben Houge (mentioned earlier)
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I love Heavy Metal.
Master of Puppets.
Powerslave.
Paranoid.
Arise.
Reign in Blood.
etc...
Actually, you can probably do well with some good ethnic or folk music, I occasionally tuned in to an online Radio Rivendell for some of that.
We mostly listen to "Erdenstern".
Great music for a great ambiance. ;)
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I go classical.
Khatchaturian's Waltz from Masquerade is one of my favorite for Ravenloft. It's been done for the ballroom, for the country, for the gypsy caravan... Just when you want to drive the point home that you can't leave.
Aw, heck, Ravenloft gets love from me. Carmina Burana, Maksim Mrvica's version of Liszt's Totentanz, Epicon's Sarabande Suite, and, of course, when I just want to blow away any and all subtlety, Juno Reactor's Navras.
It all depends on what kind of feeling you want to invoke. For large overbearing epic pieces you should check out Immediate music, Two-steps from hell, X-ray dog and Thomas Bergersen (all can be found on youtube). There are also plenty of good classical music like armina burana and toccata and fugue in d-minor.
I completely agree with this statement. Two Steps From Hell especially have a wonderful repertoire of both dramatic building-up-to-epic-crescendo music you could fight an army to (listen to tracks called 'Protectors of the Earth', 'To Glory', and '1000 Ships of the Underworld'), and some softer but no less epic stuff which is purely amazing (try 'Heart of Courage', 'Undying Love' and 'After the Fall'). Thomas Bergersen and Immediate Music are just as epic... has anyone else heard of these artists/tracks? They deserve to be much better known...
I wish I could play music to the game group I run, but they didn't seem up for it when I suggested it. The PF game I play in, we're in a public space we share with about 10 other gaming groups so no music option there... however, there's no denying for me that there'd be nothing more epic than beating a massive campaign boss just as the best bit of a song starts playing.