D&D 5E Ambient music

[DRF]

Hi everyone,

I am in the process of preparing Curse of Strahd, and I came across this site: https://www.ambient-mixer.com/

There's lots of cool and ominous ambient music, and I am considering using it for certain parts of the story. At least for Death House I think it might be cool, and probably other locations too. Have you used/has your DM used ambient music, and how did it work? Did it get annoying after a while, or did it add an interesting layer? I really want to instill a sense of horror and angst in my players, and I think it's something I would enjoy as a player.

Opinions?

 

[Nevvur]

As a DM, I find even the backgroundiest of music to be too distracting. I've tried it a few times over the years, and each time I ended up turning it off after a couple minutes.

Never been a player at a table where the DM included it.

 

[rgoodbb]

as an occasional DM, I try to find tunes to fit the scenario. I have creepy music to build tension and more upbeat for battles and soft background for most of the rest.

The trick for me is to find something subtle. It doesn't want to take over and I dont play it loud. If you type in rpg battle music onto youtube, you often find epic music that I find is too much. Rather than distract, my players have commented that they feel more immersed and I believe less is more here.

Movie and game soundtracks have been the best finds for me. I am rather sad as I have spent hundreds of hours scouring over them to find just the track to fit a scene.

Critical Role's list has some very good tracks in, and also some I wouldn't use at all.

I tried and bought Syrinscape but never seem to use it.

Enjoy.

 

[Nebulous]

Hi everyone,

I am in the process of preparing Curse of Strahd, and I came across this site: https://www.ambient-mixer.com/

There's lots of cool and ominous ambient music, and I am considering using it for certain parts of the story. At least for Death House I think it might be cool, and probably other locations too. Have you used/has your DM used ambient music, and how did it work? Did it get annoying after a while, or did it add an interesting layer? I really want to instill a sense of horror and angst in my players, and I think it's something I would enjoy as a player.

Opinions?

Those look really cool. As a DM, I have been using ambient soundtracks since 2nd edition, and back then it was Conan and Ride of the Valkyries on CD. In 3rd edition I upgraded to a program called RPG sound mixer, and I use it to this day. It comes with a bunch of preloaded sound effects, but you can import anything you want. So over the years i've accumulated hundreds if not thousands of sound effects and music tracks.

Here is a screenshot from my current Tomb of Annihilation campaign:

There are more music sounds queued up than what is shown. For example, if you touch S for the scary sounds, there are half a dozen random songs it will pull up. You can also tweak it for exactly how random you want it to be.

A lot of work? Yeah. But if you want to control your sessions like a movie scene, I have never found anything better. Now, this program might not be available anymore. I bought it during the early 3rd editions days, so it's 15 years old and ran on Windows XP. Also, finding music tracks from movies often requires buying the albums, but once you have it, the songs are easy to import.

Track D, Dino fighting music, is from the movie Jupiter Ascending, just a so-so film, but DAMN is that a pumping soundtrack. And appropriate for a Chult jungle adventure. Last session, I used Z(Zombie horde) and (N) non violent dino sounds to great effect too, as well as J(jungle ambiance), a cacophony of jungle sounds that can either loop forever or just for a few seconds.

Anyway, YES, ambient sounds gets my full vote.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I currently am running a pair of Curse of Strahd games and for both I use background music and the sound effects gathered from Ambient Mixer. If you want some good music for CoS, I'd recommend The 13th Hour and the Dungeons & Dragons Soundtrack, both by Midnight Syndicate. 13th Hour especially has a lot of really creepy music that adds a tremendous amount of atmosphere to your CoS game. You can buy both off Amazon as MP3 albums for like 9 bucks each.

As far as Ambient Mixer is concerned... as part of my Dashboard by signing up for the free service, I have links to several really good tracks I found in the system, as well as a handful of ones I've created myself for certain situations that can occur within the game. Some of these include:

Inside the Blue Tavern Inn
Riding in a carriage up to Castle Ravenloft
Zombies wander about the village of Barovia
The screams of the Mongrelfolk at the Abbey of St. Markovia
The Vistani campfire at the Tser Pool encampment
Walking up the mountain to the Amber Temple
Baba Lysaga off amongst the ruins of Berez
In the woods near the werewolf den
Wandering around inside Castle Ravenloft
Outside on the roof of the Castle amongst the parapets

 

[Wulffolk]

Lots of great stuff on YouTube. Take a listen to:
Nox Arcana (especially Night of the Wolf)
Wardruna
Eliwagar
Faun

There is some excellent Doom Metal, some of it instrumental, on the StonedMeadowOfDoom channel.

Tons of medieval ambient music and sounds . . Harps, tavern music, battle hymns, gothic chants, viking music, halloween soundtracks

The soundtrack from Bram Stoker's Dracula would fit perfectly

Amongst hundreds of other bands and composers.

 

[Ganymede81]

I've been using Ambient Mixer for my Curse of Strahd campaign and it works well. The trick is to stick with sound effects, drones, and pads so it isn't too obtrusive.

It was really effective for creating atmosphere at the Vistani camp and the rain-soaked winery.

 

[Dax Doomslayer]

I use Syrinscape (which I find a lot of fun) and also purchased a lot of music from Plate Mail Games. This pretty much has me covered for just about everything.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I use Pandora for background music most of the time. Sometimes the algorithm goes haywire, and it starts playing old timey big band on my Skyrim station (thanks Fallout), but it mostly does the trick. I keep the volume pretty low as well, as some of us are musicians with varying degrees of hearing damage!

 

[robus]

As far as Ambient Mixer is concerned... as part of my Dashboard by signing up for the free service, I have links to several really good tracks I found in the system, as well as a handful of ones I've created myself for certain situations that can occur within the game.

Ambient Mixer does have a large selection of great soundscapes, I wish the dashboard was more configurable though.

I'd love to make some soundsets for the different adventures. A Curse of Strahd set for example.

Syrinscape was also missing this feature (and in the end I stopped using it as I was paying for something that wasn't fulfilling my needs).