Wasteland Vibes
Added 2020-08-09 18:44:15 +0000 UTCOne of my favorite RPG tropes is the wasteland town. Sometimes that's pretty literal—90% of the towns you encounter throughout the Fallout series have this sort of frontier Americana vibe while still being nearly lifeless outside of the few homesteaders living nearby. There are plenty of fantasy examples as well: Planescape's "gate-towns" are cities build around portals to the Outer Planes, and some of them have some pretty wild physics and geometry. "Curst" (at least as it's depicted in Planescape: Torment) has this crunchy and unique border-town aesthetic that makes it great for adventuring.
I love frontier towns, because their relative isolation means that right around the corner, there's an 80% chance of danger, but also a 20% chance of opportunity. Sure, you might encounter bandits, but you might also discover some long-forgotten ruins, a damsel in distress, or a foreign people you never knew existed.
I tried to capture all of that in this new track of mine "Here on the Fringes." It's got a taste of that bluesy Americana, but there are also more foreign elements. You get the sense that you're on the frontier, but the specifics are... vague at best. I definitely borrowed a lot from the Fallout series as well as the soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop. While this is meant for distant towns in a Western or other American-flavored adventure, it can also work as a theme for roving bandits, or even certain dungeons. Go wild!
There's no variant for this one, so you can grab the loop below. Cheers!
