Given that I designed the adventure my players are on over two years ago - it's just taken them that long to get through the stuff I had prepared ahead of time (and we haven't been playing as frequently as we used to this year) - I've had little planning to do as a DM. Sure, I do have to make adjustments, and I've integrated stat blocks and other things that have come out in the meantime (having more vampire stat blocks from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and Tome of Beasts/Creature Codex is very useful right now.)
But thanks to my friend/roommate's subscription to Spotify, I've been using the service to put together playlists for my D&D campaign.
I have a fairly large number of playlists (each listed as Duck of Power's D&D, and then the name of the specific list, if you can find them) for different situations.
I've almost exclusively stuck to video game music, as I find that music designed for games (outside of cutscenes) tends to be designed without a massive build or drop off in intensity (there are some exceptions even among the ones I've used.) A lot of old-school game music isn't quite up to what we're looking for, in terms of instrumental quality (not to badmouth Chiptunes if you're into that kind of thing) but thankfully a lot of people have done covers that sound fantastic.
I have the following lists. Each is over an hour long, some of them reaching more than two hours, which helps them from getting repetitive over a night of gaming.
General Exploration:
This one is the sort of catch-all - any time the players are traversing the world, or going through standard fantasy environments. There are a lot of overworld themes here, particularly from Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and World of Warcraft.
Heroic Combat:
This is the standard combat mix. Once we roll initiative, this goes on unless we're using a more specific combat mix. The music gets more intense, but the tone is generally meant to be exciting - showcasing our brave heroes fighting their foes.
Dark Exploration:
This one's meant to be all about the creepiness. This one is going to get a lot of use in the current adventure (more or less replacing General Exploration.) Again, lots of WoW stuff here, with a bit of Diablo III and Darkest Dungeon. The intention for this mix is not to just be any dangerous place, but specifically those that give you the creeps. Given that the party is currently in a large barony ruled by a racist vampire wizard, there's a lot of gothic (and cosmic) horror elements for them to explore.
Dark Combat:
The notion behind this mix is that Heroic Combat is all about facing foes that you're evenly matched for - that your heroes will feel confident that they can prevail against said foes. Dark Combat is meant to instill a sense of panic and terror - the monster is here, and you're in a fight for your life. Naturally, there's a lot of Bloodborne boss music, though I'm pretty happy with "Assault on New Avalon" from WoW (it's the music that plays toward the end of the Death Knight starting experience, once you're basically overwhelming the Scarlet Crusade with swarms of undead.)
Otherworldly Locales:
To a large extent, this is meant to be for planar travel. It's a little less focused, but I've allowed for a little more sci-fi music here, like stuff from Mass Effect 2. There's a fair amount from the Burning Crusade WoW expansion here as well, which is the most science-fantasy expansion they've had (except maybe Legion, but its space-demon stuff was mostly in later patches, which, annoyingly, don't come on the soundtracks to the expansions.)
Ancient Locales:
This is mostly for ancient ruins - the kind of places you might find buried in sand or hidden underground. There's a slightly ominous, slightly otherworldly feel to this, but the notion is that these places are very ancient. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with its pseudo-Egyptian music, worked great for this. Likewise, a lot of the Temple music from Ocarina of Time (plus two covers of the Stone Tower Temple theme from Majora's Mask.) Finally, the soundtrack to Riven has a great number of tracks for this. Also, basically any Draenei-themed music from WoW.
General Urban:
This is the mix for city music. It's generally a bit upbeat, and provides an alternative when going through cities and major towns from the General Exploration mix. I'll confess that I think this one needs a bit of work.
Western Exploration:
There's a region of my homebrew setting that feels very Wild West, and so I took a lot of music from Red Dead Redemption and Bastion, which works pretty well here.
Western Combat:
Similar sources, these are tracks that are geared a bit more toward fighting.
Works in Progress:
Not a list, but I would like, at some point, to create mixes for traveling by sea or on airships. I have playlists, but they're not long enough for me to really want to use them. There's some Assassin's Creed Black Flag on them, but it's hard to find stuff with just the right tone I'm looking for. A naval combat mix would also be great (I really want to try out the naval combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.)
No comments:
Post a Comment