Fan Club “Blog” #3: Sharing My Playlists

Here's Idle Blades, my playlist for Blades in the Dark that I spent waaaay to much time making https://open.spotify.com/playlist/20ae7x7l41R9KJmF78oLAt?si=tKtnBLNwQNOT0DzyIU1Kig&pi=NtGghnCDQE6cT I deliberatively avoided songs with lyrics and crescendos, as that really messes with the mood/focus. It's all got a steady BPM, and a moody vibe. And hammer dulcimer, so much hammer dulcimer

oldpapapopnlock

Funny random fact: in Spanish, Game Master is ‘Director de Juego’, so GM becomes DJ 😅

HipsteRPG

I've really enjoyed curating a playlist for Wildsea. There's a particular type of ambient but unsettling electronic music that fits perfectly with what I see in my minds eye. "Gonna Be" by Duval Timothy is a great example of the eerie stuff, then something like "Glimmer of Dope Theme 3" by Freaky Chakra is perfect for a battle sequence with a giant frog or whatever. I have four playlists for it: "downtime", "tension", "climax" and then for the really weird stuff, "the dark depths".

Mathew Haine

For my Call of Cthulhu Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign i use the Syrinscape soundboard, which is specifically designed for this campaign and i love it. There are templates for every scene and location described in the book and it takes a lot of time effort away from me when prepping. Only downside is the price, but for me its worth it for a campaign that will probably last up to 2 years. I really like the idea of an intro and outro song. I will try that. Though i dont know which song whould be fitting for this setting.

Luxinlay

Necro-commenting I suppose. When I ran my game of Outgunned for my friends (a custom little module I made tailored to their characters), I was able to score it with an occasional lyric filled song of my own. The real magic however was on character creation, I gave everyone a one-time use Needledrop, a song on my music app, down to the timestamp they wanted THE moment to be. It gave them an instant +2 dice to their pool for their next roll to be used at a character defining moment and a guarantee that my narration would be timed for that moment. It really made the game night feel like an incredible night at the movies.

C Robertson

Another tip I can add: consider having leitmotifs for your most important NPCs. I wouldn't use this for NPCs the players interact very often with, but for the people whose presence must have an impact, like an ancient prophet, or the main villain. 4 years ago I ran a campaign revolving around the interactions between three godlike beings and the ways the party messed with their plans; each of them had their own theme playlist and it was awesome. On an unrelated note, I had much more time then than today and I used to assemble tons of playlists for my games, I thought I'd share them with you beautiful people :) There's now about 24 playlists on my spotify, organized by mood and a few by leitmotif. They're made for d&d, but can work for any fantasy game. You can find them by looking for the user "Chane Anagon" and then going to public playlists

em.path

I find the act of putting together a playlist to be a really helpful part of figuring out tone when working on a campaign or setting material. Usually this isn’t a practical playlist, it’s not ambient tracks or stuff I’d play mid-session, but the kind of music that puts me in the headspace for the game, and that often turns up as intro/outro tracks. Though a rec I do have for anyone wanting dark but not fully creepy background music is Johann Johannson’s The Miners Hymns.

Ian Wyant

If you are a music-lover and designing/running a campaign setting, music can be an incredible tool for creating! Whenever I design a world, it always starts with the music. For me, that is the way that I attach myself to places and people, so that translates fluidly to placing myself and my friends in a fantasy world. I highly encourage taking a Baz Luhrmann sort of approach to music as well. I’m currently writing a sea-faring campaign and you would not believe how well 60s-70s soul and psychedelic rock music fits into that setting! Like Quinns said in the Wildsea video, your interest in a campaign will initially be based on vibes. Whether those vibes are evoked from music, stunning visuals, or detailed characters, make sure to play to your unique strengths! Great blog as always, Quinns :) happy role playing, everyone!

Luke Dubec

Do yourself a favor and look up the Inscription video game sound track. So so good for legitimately spooky vibes.

Cave Darr

Please tell me that Stonetop is on the calendar for future review. I missed the KS and I'm seriously looking at a later pledge to get the content, but I can't find anything in the way of a decent review. I'm coming at it from the point of view of someone who bounced off PbtA previously but recently fell in love with Brindlewood Bay and is looking for something in the family that is a little different...

Kevin Campion

Oh man this is perfect! (and such a good game too).

Barca206

In our FIST campaign I had my players fill out a list of tracks that they love from around the 60s - 90s and every session we play has one of their songs play over the "opening credits" as they infiltrate the mission zone!

Erin

A nice ambient game soundtrack for fantasy is the Roadwarden album by Nick Roder. https://open.spotify.com/album/2G9GUKTkUOzn5PSVTvv1wB?si=DRPu0mxSTM63mPfHEi3Lkg

Aaron Smithies

For anyone GM'ing Heart: I highly recommend Avalon from The Huntress and the Holder of Hands to pick intro/outro music from. That album is mentioned in the Heart book as well. We use Shake Of Your Flesh as an opening, and it gets everyone in the vibe immediately.

Fabian

For anyone using YT Music, I did my best to recreate the DG playlist for my own use. Feel free to grab it. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLem3zE4GAbm8hl06gFfd6Awt-SPCzVhcO&si=I8zzav_5Xgfetp4I

David Annable

I've been planning on introducing an opening and ending theme to my longest yet running campaign, but I'm drawing a blank on what would be a good fit. So, might as well ask all you definately more knowledgeable folk. The setting is high fantasy, takes place in a jungle. Themes are very horror and exploration focused. Any suggestions for tunes are really welcome!

Ahti Katiska

I like when RPGs have recommended play lists, reading lists and watch lists to help the group establish the tone the writer was first going for.

gm_naahz

I completely agree with the point about how often music has been scored to tell a story, and often that doesn't work at the table where the story is fluid. I've found a few soundtracks where the tracks themselves are very short, just a couple minutes, and so the vibe of the track doesn't vary much. Currently for this campaign currently set in a Princess Mononoke-esque forest I've been using the soundtrack for an anime called Ranking of Kings. I've got different playlists set up not only for traveling through the forest, and combat, but I'm the nerd that has specific tracks queued up as themes for each player that I'll pop on when a scene is focusing on them. I currently don't play at my residence due to space issues, so I can't really set up a space in the way I'd like, but one of my goals is to grab a stream deck and nice speaker that will fill the room so I can DJ without fiddling with Spotify on my phone or laptop.

Brandon Johnson

Quinns

Our world is just action packed, full throttle. The ship is called Tzla because it is sleek aluminum and has the speed Stat maxed (and almost everything else 1) and uses electricity and batteries for everything. I haven't made Playlists yet, but the theme song might be "danger zon ". First session they escaped a tall shank port that was collapsing (tall shank got unstable) , but juts dropping their ship from the 1km hight, then deploying their kite sails at just the right time and timing it with firing their tesla coil and engines against the sea.. And that was just a regular Sunday to the crew. We don't have a lot of scenes about the crews inner feelings, but maybe that is okay, don't think I will force it, but just gently introduce a few scenes here and there.

Philip Kristoffersen

Surprising no-one who knows me, I do this all the time - intro music, needle drops, themed playlists. Once I managed to do an opening DIE battle to Atlas by Battles, and managed to time my GMing to the structure of the song, and managed to do some sections of description to interact with the song's beats. (They were fighting the ALL AROUND THE WORLD daft punk robots)

Kieron

Quinns

For Trail of Cthulhu or Call of Cthulhu, Graham Plowman's music is mostly perfect as background mood music: https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/graham-plowman/455831619 And then there's the obvious in-world/diagetic type music that's appropriate for a 30s atmosphere: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/trail-of-cthulhu/pl.u-06oxDB6udm8ea I find sourcing appropriate 'scifi' music a little harder however. It tends to be either drumbeat laden or too hyperactive. I'm prepping a Bladerunner RPG game and the only artist I've found that really fits is a person called 'SpacewaveCR': https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/spacewavecr/1676915085

Jonathan Seamons

For anyone that uses YouTube Music, here's the first Wildsea playlist. https://music.youtube.com/browse/VLPL-GQ1EmHbUHj9W5CRfblPIeByN_r8rC5Y

Alex Chin

Keep it coming. Great thinking!

Jere Widenius (Kasanen)

YESS I have been beating this drum for years. TV and Movie moments are scored moments! They're not what serves best at the table if you're just talking over music for 10 minutes! I spend oodles of time on playlists for games when I get one spun up.

Brendan McLeod

Excellent and inspiring post. It does make me wonder, Quinns, whether you and your trusty Bluetooth speaker have crossed the line and begun adding soundtrack to other aspects of your life… 🤔

Brett Rolfe

I didn't realize they had a patreon. Nice!

birdmilk

I also highly recommend Tabletop Audio, who is on Patreon for RPG soundtracks. He offers tracks with various themes and each track often has a few versions with more or less background noise relative to the ambient music

Wyverary

Yeah, that’s the way to go when you tend towards the more verbose I guess. I never used to post anything on places like this as I’d overthink it and then either chicken out or loose the moment of relevancy. Also they reenforce all the social anxiety I’ve mostly overcome in other areas of my life, so the cost never seemed worth paying. Ah, shit maybe this is oversharing. Sorry if that’s the case. Somehow this space feels too perfect for me not to participate, though, so I’ve just decided to try my best. Thanks for your comment! It means a lot actually.

Ainar Miyata

Speaking of intro songs, I'm lucky enough to have a sound designer in one of my games who wrote a whole song just for it! We start every session by playing it while we recap

Nathan Klassen

Has happened a few times to me as well. I gave up and now I write comments in a Google doc and then copy paste.

Philip Kristoffersen

Super interesting to hear your wildsea Playlists. I can tell, just from the music you picked, that your wildsea is very different from mine. Shows how far music goes at setting the tone of the game, but also how different our "expression through GMing" can be, after reading the same book.

Philip Kristoffersen

Yeah, sorry! Got a bit too excited, there. I was writing one long comment on my phone which got deleted when I navigated out of the window before posting, so I got scared and just started spamming instead.

Ainar Miyata

Quinns

Can’t believe nobody has mentioned Cryo Chamber for ambient music yet! They are the go to for dark ambiance: https://youtube.com/@cryochamberlabel?si=YcWxLDa-Oz4l09Lt

Ainar Miyata

Quinns

By the way, the only time film scores (and most classical music) truly works as background is when you are let the music drive the scene. So when the music tells you that the scene is turning sad, that’s your cue to make it sad. This is pretty challenging to make work, but it create some extremely intense improv drama. I’ve done this successfully a couple of times, with scores I knew extremely well and had spent a lot of time curating beforehand. The result was pretty magical, but it required way to much prep and was pretty much max level difficult to pull off.

Ainar Miyata

Generally, I think music in games can be used effectively to do two different things: 1. To create a mood or ambiance And 2. To mark out a special moment of significance 1. Can be achieved through the kind of music in the playlists Quinn’s shared, through ambient noise, etc. while you are playing. But it can also be done by cue: playing a piece of intro music which sets the mood is the typical example of this. This can have elements that would otherwise be distracting, such as lyrics and dynamics, because it’s meant to be listened to, not played to. You can do this to introduce location changes, to introduce a boss, to signify a time skip, etc. The music sets the mood and then it’s done. 2. Is for when you want to make the music a special part of a moment. Typically, in my games, this is when there is some in game event that involves music. An example from one of my games: a player was revealed to be the long lost warrior emperor of a civilization of conqueror-birds. Unbeknownst to the player I had written an anthem for the character and had practiced singing it with the other players, so when he was greeted by his people, we all stood up and sang to him. Another example: i had a sequence when a character who was presumed dead returned to play and was turned out to have joined a crew that was an homage to the Guardians of the Galaxy. I put on “Come and get your love” while narrating, and that was the cue that clues the players into what was happening, and we narrated a montage of the character’s return to the song. If you have some idea of what is supposed to happen ready, then it can be amazing to improvise montages to well known songs.

Ainar Miyata

A dream of mine that has recently become feasible due to AI is to have a custom intro song for my campaigns, like a tv show. For my current campaign, I was able to create a full on opening credits sequence using sumo.ai for the music, dall-e for the images and runway for editing and animation. It took about 30 hours to make, but it was worth it for the reaction from my players alone. https://youtu.be/Qw-5gbSgRoQ?si=JUjpEMu-sg3hJO9z

Ainar Miyata

I was about to hop on and say ‘The Haxan Cloak’ is perfect for your creepy dark soundtrack needs but then noticed you’d mentioned his stuff in the edit addendum. My last BITD was saturated with his music. 😁

BassPope

Music is difficult, but amazing when you get it right. All your tips are great. If you can have someone other than you as the GM do the dj-ing, it’s a lifesaver.

Ainar Miyata

Just remembered I wrote up an AP of a Spire-Kingdom hybrid game I ran (https://docs.google.com/document/d/11OfyYSDy2ooGarH-g83pxxW9GTfFSCNj2s_Fqt_aTT8/edit?usp=sharing) and I included the (partial) tracklist: Ambient: Spire tracks on Tabletop Audio & Daemmerlicht album by Recondite First Crossroads Resolution: Keep the Streets Empty for Me by Fever Ray Second Crossroads Resolution: Familiar by Agnes Obel Third Crossroads Resolution: Me and the Devil by Soap&Skin Epilogue & Credits: Here’s to You by Joan Baez Honorable Mentions: the Battle from Spec Ops: the Line, Prelude to War from BSG, Elegia by New Order, and the entire discography of Ancient Methods The Battle was especially good as I used that when narrating everything which led up to the game, and there was a drop which just synced perfectly with when I moved on to explaining the current scenario.

Eóin Dooley

L'ultima diligenza di red rock was a staple for setting tone in my Vaesen campaign. It's got such a delightful creeping tension. https://open.spotify.com/track/1dbf8JY7I2WJ8xgdlnEhTi?si=045e5b0f71c444b3

Calvin Golas

I had a gm run cyberpunk red and edm was a huge vibe syringe injected straight into the table

birdmilk

Quinns

I was running a horror game for a pair of guys I used to play with years ago. They'd never seen Ravenous and I was slowly building up a horror scene and the way this piece of music builds is amazing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCS8mGI4o7U&ab_channel=matM24 Also, my GM for my, sigh, 5th edition game uses a fine selection of Final Fantasy soundtracks which can be amazing whenever a fight kicks off or very chill when wandering around a fantastical town.

Backpack Boom Bap (Tom)

I'm a big advocate of music at the table, and can get a bit obsessive about finding the right songs for big moments that I suspect are coming up. One more tip I'd toss in is the use of tracks from the IDM / techno / electronica genre space, as those are often about establishing a texture which lasts for a few minutes and can be easily looped. They can also get *real* intense for when you want combat / suspense. (Edit: See reply beneath for more stuff. Patreon makes it hard to see when someone's elaborated on a point without editing everything into one big comment or making multiple comments.)

Eóin Dooley

Having a player DJ was a real game changer for me. Music is so impactful but it was just another thing I would occasionally forget about. Now it is always on point and the dj player is consistently more engaged. I need to get a way to signal for silence though because that's genius.

birdmilk

Thank you for including the header image. It sets a tone.

Gregory Morrison