Joshua Dyal said:
But, really, what the heck is modern metal music have to do with fantasy gaming? I see no correlation whatsoever. It'd like using the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink for the Lord of the Rings movies, yet nobody ever suggests that...
Foreword: this isn't intended to be an attack on you, Joshua. And I don't understand the specific linkage between metal and all types of fantasy, Led Zeppelin faux-occultism aside. It's just a viewpoint to consider.
Interestingly enough, I think that modern music can often set a mood better than music that we try to associate with that spacetime. My reasoning is that, to my contemporary ears, music from long ago
sounds old - but when it was written it was cutting edge, fresh, new. Most of what we call 'classical' music was, when it was written,
popular music - designed to please an audience and thus garner favor (and thus money!) from a patron. Personally I think that the experience I get from listening to a Vivaldi remix, with a thumping bass and drum kick added to
The Four Seasons, is much closer to the experience it created for a contemporary of Vivaldi's. The piano, the clarinet, the pipe organ, all of these represented the pinnacle of acoustic research and engineering for the first generation of musicians who played them, just as the electric guitar, AM synthesizer, and CD turntable have done so in more recent history.
Not that I'm trying to say Man-o-war will make your Conan d20 a more enjoyable game. Yeeesh.
On a side note, who says that music in a campaign world has to come from medieval and renaissance Europe? A world with magic might have Goa-ish trance as an old, outdated style of music, something for ancient wizards to zonk out over their spellbooks with. Give the masses something they can listen to, like a halfling bard on the corner rapping about the oppressive taxation levied by the sorceror-king on Persons of Diminutive Species.
I'd imagine jazz, and especially bebop, to be the popular music of Eberron. Aside from its association with the pulp genre (think Green Hornet or Cowboy Bebop), it's the music of a time of uncertainty and change, where old ways and nations are crumbling and new ways and nations vie for survival. I'll probably dig out some baroque stuff for a noble House every now and then, and perhaps Gregorian chanting or folk hymns for the Church of the Silver Flame. The Lord of Blades will probably use industrial music for religious services; the sound of machinery
is the warforged creation myth. I don't see classical music having much of a place there, and I can't think of any campaign world that really necessitates it as a primary form of expression - though many (Greyhawk comes to mind) would fit it much more easily.
