For me, music is a large part of my story writing; I often sit around for hours listening to music while I write the story to a campaign, with the music usually being somewhat related to the campaign and what it's about and represents. For instance, when I was writing the story for my pirate campaign I listened to loads of pirate-y music, and it really helped me come up with and imagine kick-ass concepts and ideas. Also, sometimes I play music in the background just to set the mood, like in taverns and such. One time I even played this epic piano masterpiece when a bard NPC was romancing and trying to impress one of the players, and it really magnified the experience for the player and everyone else. So I guess my main questions are these: Do you ever play music out loud in your campaigns? Has music helped your flow of ideas? Have you gotten any ideas directly from any particular songs?
I usually put on the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale soundtracks while we play, but just as background music. A few songs have provided a little inspiration, Sonata Arctica's Reckoning Night album usually gets my juices running for Germanic and Scandinavian inspired adventures, or adventures along coastal territory. Little bit off topic, but what kind of pirate-y music did you listen to? I went through a pirate-y phase last summer, but I could never find any good music to listen to while swigging rum.
Well, the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack is an obvious choice. A couple other good sources are these: Dan Bull, who is a British rapper on YouTube, made an Assassin's Creed IV rap called "Hoist the Black Flag" that basically described the main character of the campaign I was Dming! Ween's "The Blarney Stone" is a combination of Irish drinking music and pirate songs to me (really inspired a quest involving Irish pirates and The Blarney Stone itself), and the band Alestorm is a "pirate metal" band. Some of their songs are good. MOCKSTARS, a group on YouTube, made a Jack Sparrow rap on YouTube featuring NicePeter (although I mainly like Peter's part), and The Lonely Island's "Jack Sparrow" has some pretty pirate-y parts (especially the choruses, which inspired my favorite pirate I ever made). The "One Piece" theme song rap was pretty good for me as well, inspiring some of the enemy pirates I made. I'll be fair, a lot of those are just more modern-y songs about pirates, instead of the traditional pirate song style, but they inspired me nonetheless. However, if you surf YouTube (which you can probably tell by now that I do often) and look up "Pirate music", and/or add the word "Traditional" before that, you should stumble across some more of those more traditional songs. That's all I got, sorry if I disappointed you!
For Reign of Winter, I have a playlist I've been culturing that consists of mostly works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and a sprinkling of Tchaikovsky. I play it when typing up campaign notes and I aim to have it play in the background when we game.
I believe music is the ultimate mood enhancer when tabletop gaming.
Ansel Krulwich wrote:
I believe music is the ultimate mood enhancer when tabletop gaming.
I agree completely, but sadly most of my friends don't so wecan't do it very much.
My roommate based every campaign of his we played off a Ronnie James Dio song.
Valiante wrote: I went through a pirate-y phase last summer, but I could never find any good music to listen to while swigging rum. Alestorm is the best "pirate music" I've heard. If you want a twist, I find Abney Park is the best "airship pirate music."
Anyway, no, I don't play any music during games--it's nothing but distracting. I've seen GMs do it, always to disastrously inattentive players.
Most epic campaign I ever participated in was based off a Rush song. One of the players figured it out about a month before the end of it.
Another friend of mine describes himself as a "mad DJ" of a GM. His games have elaborate soundtracks and lots of in-game music. He also has been known to volunteer soundtracks for other GMs' games (usually to good effect).
Absolutely none.
I'm not a big "sit down and listen to music" kind of guy in the first place, and any time I try to use BGM my players say it makes it somehow hard to hear me if it's even vaguely audible, so I dun use it there either.
Which sucks because I really wanted to use some good spooky BGM for Carrion Crown.
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