Music in your sessions?

If you play with music in your sessions, I'd be interested in what you listen to.

I generally set up Winamp (much <3 for winamp) with different playlists depending on the situation. I have a 'general play' list, a 'battle' list, and a 'creepy' list of music so far.


It's all about the ambience, baby.

Yeah, I use the three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, Signs, the Mummy, Sleepy Hollow, Last Samurai, Last of the Mohicans, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Troy, Van Helsing, Bram Stoker's Dracula, End of Days, Sum of All Fears, the three Harry Potter soundtracks, and many many others. I don't have the songs sorted by particular ambience; I just pick songs that are the right atmosphere in general for the campaign, rip them on to a CD full of mp3, and put it on shuffle.

The problem I find is becoming intimately familiar with a large enough music collection to be useful. I've got lots of soundtracks, but remembering exactly which cut has which feel, and which ones have the right sort of timing for the scene is difficult.

On top of that, I don't have a laptop, so at best I can only burn a few CDs of music, rather than have the whole collection on hand...

Except that I just got a TiVo box. And, I've discovered that if your TiVo is on a network with your home computer, you can have it play music files from your PC onto your home theatre speakers. This has promise...

I leached some ambience sounds from various ressources, thus I can't/ don't want to distribute them, but it's basically background sound effects that I edited so that they can be looped ad infinitum. I have forest, river, ocean, rain, plains, mountains, ruins, dungeon, lightningstorm, and some others.

I play them at low volume, so that they don't become too distracting, but they really help setting up the mood in our games.

Two words:

Tangerine Dream

I use Rock music alot for battle music, as well as RPG music and some movie soundtracks for things.

My collection is about 1,300 songs (Half RPG music, half rock music) and I narrow even that down to a good 60 song list.

It definatly requires an extensive music collection to get just the right *feel* for something and not hear the same songs over and over every 30 minutes of play.

We do frequently play music, although I don't generally try to mesh specific tracks to specific events in the adventure. One exception: when we play Star Wars, I do always start the session with the 20th Century Fox Fanfare, followed by the Main Title from A New Hope.

For D&D, soundtracks I play include:
- All three Lord of the Rings
- The two Mummy movies
- Stargate (the original movie)
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- King Arthur
- Henry V

I'll also occasionally play Clannad and / or Enya.

I have a large collection of soundtracks that I choose very specifically. I'd rather have only one great music piece to fit a situation than several well-fitting ones. I compiled 3 CDs for my CD changer, one with "creepy" music seperated into subsections like Rituals, Dungeons, etc., the second with heroic music for Battle, Triumph, etc., and the third with various ambient music for special occasions.

Normally, I don't use mujsic with lyrics or contemporary music. However, for the Dungeon Adventure Path I'm currently DMing, I have compiled a soundtrack for the module, giving specific events their own music, and included modern sounds (for example, when set upon by a thieve's guild, I played "Invisible Man" by Queen - the thieves are made up like actors and call themselves "Last Laugh", and I wanted to use "I'm going slightly mad" but that was not fast enough).

What I do before choosing music is consciously listening to music for the effect it has on me and the atmosphere it creates.
A good piece of music can enhance the role-playing experience alsmost as much as a bad piece can ruin it.

BTW, if you are looking for a lot of great movie scores, I can only urge you to try Erich Kunzel's Cincinatti Pop Orchestra. They play movie scores on a full orchestral ensemble - it's great!

For the most part we don't use background music, but when we do it's Midnight Syndicate. Another reason why we don't listen to too much music while playing is because our group is always bouncing from place to place. None of us wants to bring a cd player along with a mountain of books. You got to prioritize.

Sigdel said:

For the most part we don't use background music, but when we do it's Midnight Syndicate. Another reason why we don't listen to too much music while playing is because our group is always bouncing from place to place. None of us wants to bring a cd player along with a mountain of books. You got to prioritize.

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Most definatly. Sometimes we go from place to place and those sessions we don't have music.

Berandor said:

Normally, I don't use mujsic with lyrics or contemporary music.

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I find songs with lyrics hard to integrate as well. If you space them out and keep the lyric songs limited, though, you can have a very nice set of music. Here's the small but throughly comprehensive list of good songs (with lyrics) that could fit very nicely into D&D sessions.

The New Chevelle CD - This Type of Thinking Could Do Us In - is a great CD overall, but more importantly, contains several very 'battle-like' songs for D&D.

A good lyric song for battles is "Let The Bodies Hit the Floor" by Drowning Pool.

Yellowcard has a handful of songs that I plug in at a few places.

Within Temptation 's stuff is all really good, some battle, some not. It's a very Evanescence type of band...goth rock, that whole thing. Our group has personally overplayed this stuff though, so we're sick of it.

Besides that however, (and despite the fact that I own tons of music) these are the few songs with lyrics that stand out in my mind for D&D really in a generic sense.

Pink Floyd tops my list for number of lyric songs for typical, non-battle type music.

Besides that, I use some assortments of Final Fantasy type lyrical music. If you're really on a witch-hunt for some non-battle, lyrical music, you might check out Three Doors Down, Dave Matthew Band, and maybe even some Bela Flec / Victor Wooten.