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VoxRationis
2022-11-25, 04:41 AM
My campaign is heading to a very sword-and-sorcery kind of locale: Mexala, the City of Smoke, a great Bronze Age city of narrow alleys and looming buildings, home to a shadow war between a cabal of mind-controlling sorcerers and a drug-fueled cult of fanatical sun-worshippers, the sort of place where trust is a more precious thing than gold. I'm looking for suggestions as to music to play either for general atmosphere or for combats against one or more of the factions present in the city. Ideally, the music would convey a sense of both wonder and unease and would tend towards the exotic (as the city is culturally insular) without necessarily leaning towards Arabesque stereotypes. Does anyone know something to fit such a bill?

Melayl
2022-11-25, 12:02 PM
You could look into Syrinscape. I listen to the Find the Path actual play podcast, and they use it all the time. Quite the variety of options, from what they've mentioned, anyway.

2D8HP
2022-11-25, 10:52 PM
You can’t go wrong with the film music of Bernard Hermann


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g75xXT6eCcg

Bulhakov
2022-11-27, 10:24 AM
Dead Can Dance is a staple of RPG background music. Tracks like Cantara, Yulunga, Anabasi. Vaguely middleastern ethnic and echanting.

Thrudd
2022-11-29, 10:11 AM
There's an artist with music on youtube named Peter Pringle, who has some pieces played on reproductions of actual bronze age instruments (and other ancient instruments, like Kithara and other ancient forms of Lyres and harps). He has a few where he's singing actual passages in Sumerian. It is a bit on the Arabesque side, as he borrows a lot from later Middle Eastern music in interpreting what the melodies should be, but it might be the closest thing to an "authentic" bronze age sound you can get. Check out "Lament for Gilgamesh" for probably the coolest sounding one, and longest. On another one he sings the beginning of the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh in Akkadian with accompaniment. Most of them are only a few minutes, you'd need to make a playlist and loop them. A little more on the dreamy side vs disturbing or uneasy, though definitely evocative.