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oniyasha
2014-06-04, 05:46 PM
Hay everyone Oniyasha Here:smallcool:
I Have been churning this idea in my head for months now and i'm wondering if anybody has tried to incorporate music into there sessions EX. battle music, bar music, boss music

if so id love some suggestions. As of now all I can come up with is retro video game OST's

Thanks in advance
ONIYASHA:smallcool:

tahu88810
2014-06-04, 10:56 PM
When running a pokemon tabletop game, I'd often find remixes of themes from the game to share during battles and other events.
When playing in a dungeonworld game, someone linked an entire album for us to listen to during the climax of an epic battle.
I've spent an entire session of Geist listening to Robert Johnson while dealing with the ghost of a riverboat gambler, and I've found Battlelore to be an amazing backdrop to general dungeon plundering.

Think about what you'd expect to hear for the background if the game were a movie, and then pick things accordingly. It works wonders.

FidgetySquirrel
2014-06-04, 11:53 PM
All the time! I find it's usually best to go for tracks that aren't too powerful, though. They tend to distract the players. I do make an exception for things that are supposed to be epic, however, like a war-style battle or a boss fight.

RPG OSTs are a good way to go. It's usually easy to find a track for almost any need. If your looking for epic battle tracks, 2 Steps From Hell is a nice road to take.

In the end, though, it depends on the group. Before putting too much thought into it, I'd see if everyone's interested in having music in-game. If not, I wouldn't recommend it.

Kol Korran
2014-06-05, 05:59 AM
I find that music can add a lot to the atmosphere, but it should remain that- atmosphere, and not the main thing. I'd suggest to avoid any well known music (Like famous film scores) or things with words, since these immediately distract the players.

Most tracks are fairly short. There are a few ways around that:
1- compile lists of tracks in Youtube or some other music service. (Be weary of commercials jumping in between tracks).
2- Search for long tracks, hour long or more. There are some epic music remixes on the web, but I don't like them much, since they change the music unexpectedly to your game. But there are some repeating single tracks for some song. For example- To Glory by two steps from hell, for 10 hours. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mi__FaFhc)
3- Someone recommended me this tool- http://www.infinitelooper.com/ You copy paste the address of the song, and it plays it repeatedly. Quite nice and simple.

You want specific examples? Well that is too big a question. For different themes and situation you may need different stuff. Two Steps from Hell have been mentioned for all your Epic needs. For horror I like music from The Alice in the Wonderland game, or Alien (Bloody creeps people out). And you have lots more. You need to be more specific. Themes from long running shows, like Battle Star Galactica, Fire fly, Deadwood and more can prove very useful, as you then can set the "music tone" for your campaign. Just don't pick the main themes since that will distract the players, as I suggested above.

One last thing- Don't be disappointed if the music didn't have the effect you wanted. Some things appeal more to some players than others. And sometime the players set a whole different tone to a scene than you do. Good luck to you!

Composer99
2014-06-05, 09:55 AM
My Pathfinder group is playing the Carrion Crown adventure path, and we (possibly inevitably) turned to the Diablo soundtrack for the first book in the path.

Millennium
2014-06-05, 11:00 AM
BGM should be kept at a low volume. This should go more or less without saying -everyone needs to be easily heard over the sound of the music- but it has some repercussions. In particular...
BGM should have a low dynamic range: in other words, the loudest parts shouldn't be very much louder than the quietest parts (not counting actual silence). Otherwise, because you're keeping the volume low, the quiet parts may drop out completely.
Avoid lyrics in your BGM, unless you are certain that no one at the table, yourself included, understands the language.
BGM that is short and repetitive (either all the way through, or after a certain point) makes it harder to sense time passing. This can be good or bad, depending on the effect you want.
Be careful using BGM from media your players are familiar with. They'll associate the scenes you use it in with the scenes the original media used it in. This can be a good shorthand for establishing the emotions you want a scene to invoke, or it can bog things down with off-topic discussion.
BGM can be a powerful tool for misleading your players, by making a scene seem like something it isn't. The classic example is using a light, friendly-sounding song as a leitmotif for the traitor in disguise. But be careful: pulling this trick more than once in a campaign is likely to spoil the effect, and even using it once runs a slight risk of making your players mad.

One last bit: if you need something along the lines of an Ominous Latin Choir, but have Latin-speakers at your table (or don't want to use Latin for some other reason), I recommend the soundtrack to the Ar tonelico series of games. Much of the music was written in a language constructed for the series itself, thus solving "the someone understands the language" problem, and they wrote songs in a wide variety of genres, including the aforementioned OLC.

Slipperychicken
2014-06-05, 09:59 PM
These (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z2mf0kjEP8) two (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYi3qT1rQzA) could work when things get creepy.

Oneris
2014-06-06, 12:07 AM
The Infinite Jukebox (http://labs.echonest.com/Uploader/index.html) can remix/extend a piece of music on the fly and essentially play it forever without it being the same twice. It's not completely seamless though, and might not do amazingly for music without lyrics, but you can upload your own mp3s for it to play.

Edit: Also, warning. It plays havoc with your sanity on a piece you are really familiar with by messing around with the repetitions. Could be used to drive your players (and yourself) slightly insane as you swear the main melody was 12 seconds longer the last time you heard it.