The Sound of Music

I have an incredible affinity for epic movie soundtracks. My personal music collection is dominated by film scores that cause my blood to stir and my heart to race. Good music evokes a very strong emotional reaction from me and not just from instrumental soundtracks. There are songs that invariably cause me to mist up when I hear them, even if I'm expecting it, others that make me want to drive entirely too fast, and still others that make me want to punch things with big, sharp teeth in their toothy faces!

So, naturally, when I started running a tabletop RPG, I decided to experiment with adding a soundtrack. I have incorporated music into my game with varying degrees of success over the past two years, and in doing so have identified a couple of challenges:

1. Movie soundtracks can be problematic for my group. My players are all huge movie buffs and so, almost any soundtrack has the potential to send an otherwise dramatic moment spiraling off track into the trackless wastes of Quote'along.
2. Movie soundtracks can be problematic in general. Each track in a movie's soundtrack tends to play like an audio-scene, complete with an arc over the course of 3-7 minutes. They can go from mystical to ominous. Tense and building to openly violent, which is great for the real-time pace of a film. Tabletop RPGs, however, play out fairly slowly with each person's turn taking about a minute; it can take a 10 minutes just to let everyone get in a sword hit. This slow pace means that tracks with a single tone throughout work much more effectively.
3. The slow pace of game play also means that it takes a lot of time and therefore a lot of music to get through a scene. It is very common for combat to take an hour or more in game... That's a lot of battle music, so it is best to build a substantial play list.
4. The temptation to get too detailed with my play list categories has threatened to overwhelm the immersive potential of the music. Maintaining broad categories like Battle, Exploring or Spooky is preferable to "The Tangled Fens when being chased by ghouls at dusk"

Anyway, having identified these challenges through many trials and errors, I believe I have developed a system that works well for my particular group. It all began when one of my fellow Portaliers brought the musical group, Two Steps from Hell to my attention. Here was an extensive source of monster-killing music that I could compile into a You Tube playlist which could easily be run during my game.

I began small by selecting a theme song for my game, which I play at the beginning of each session as we are wrapping up our dinner and getting ready to start the game. I admit that the adoption of a theme song was partially intended as a psychological experiment... which seems to be working. My players have developed a bit of a Pavlovian response to the music, like the credits of a favorite TV show, some rush to wrap up their current conversation thread before the song ends, while others immediately start to quiet down and get into game mode.

From the theme song, I began selecting music to punctuate other key moments and noting sound cues in my game notes.

The sporadic musical cues are now building towards a set of defined play lists with broad titles that can underscore the course of the game. I am currently in a disorganized collecting phase with my music... the boundaries are still hazy and the categories over-specific. Soon, however I hope to distill and combine my play lists into larger categories with broad applicability so that my game nights can have a continuous musical score, which hopefully will draw everyone deeper into the moment.