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Can you imagine watching your favorite movies without a soundtrack? Film directors use music to control audience expectation and trigger emotional responses. As a GM, you too can make use of these techniques at your gaming table. The simplest plan is to put an album on to play. Slip in a CD, get your iPod out, and press play. I once ran a Sci-Fi campaign ...

Sound is an integral part of my gaming sessions. I've always used music, but I didn't use sound effects very much until recently, when I wrote my own application for quickly choosing different sounds. It is controlled with the keyboard and also allows for displaying images along with the sound. I've put it up for download: RPG Ambience. As for your other ...

I tried it. It helped, but wasn't worth the extra work. First of all, I had to find sounds. Usually I had something in my head and wanted a pretty close match. Long story short, there were better ways to prep than googling for audio samples. But even when I did have the audio I wanted, playing it was a distraction. I can only keep track of so many ...

I am quiet fond of computer game music. It loops nicely, generally is quiet good, and has many themes similar to your game. You can get your travel, spooky, hide and sneak, and of course, combat. Examples would be Dragon Age (1 and 2), Assassin's Creed (2 and brotherhood), Europa Universalis 3 (although this one maybe a little more renaissance), Jade ...

There are some good posts on this at Gnome stew: RPG Background Music: 41 Awesome Soundtracks More Awesome RPG Background Music: 58 Reader Favorites and New Discoveries It mainly focuses on movie and game soundtracks which are often a good bet, as they are designed to evoke emotions of a certain type (chase, explore etc) and not overpower the action. ...

I have an iTunes D&D library that is broken up into playlist for several common settings or themes, Combat, Tavern, Caverns, Forest, in-town, etc. I have the playlist, which contains several songs for variety, set to continuous loop. During the beginning of the encounter or scene change, I can easily select the playlist and continue to describe the ...

A couple of years ago, D&D got it's own official soundtrack made by Midnight Syndicate, I think their music in general should fit your needs.

add to your collection While I can't use them (any background music makes it hard for me to understand my players), I'll recommend several I've found useful for pre-game mood setting: Tangerine Dream's music is excellent; the best known piece is "Geometry of Shadows" - the main title for Babylon 5. The Bab5 sound track is a good start, but their other ...

Try using SceneSound, (http://scenesound.cyclobster.com/) it is software specifically created exactly for tabletop RPG music/sounds. I also highly recommend "Songs & Dragons" for anddroid smart phones and little apps like some white noise generators also have ambient sounds like crackling fires, rain, etc that can serve as great abmiance on the fly if ...

Looking for music really slows down the start of an encounter. I recommend outsourcing this to a player with a laptop -- they have a lot less to keep track of. Sounds like a job for the bard... If you have something specific -- like there's a pipe organ haunted by an invisible stalker in Castle Whiterock and you picked out some creepy pipe organ music -- ...

Our GM uses a program he wrote to play sounds and background music as well as show mood setting images and props on a computer screen. While changing the images and sounds takes some button presses, the result is well worth it. It takes some setting up, but once you get a hang of it, it's not too hard. The sounds he used were mostly ripped from games such ...

I will take the dissenting view. I never use music as part of a game, except for very specific narrow situations where it's a plot point or one time gimmick. It is distracting, both for players and for the GM - either you let whatever's on play and it isn't really appropriate to whatever's going on, or you waste GM time fiddling with it and losing momentum ...

Selection The two factors I look for when choosing campaign music are mood and lack of disruption. Though mood is critical, but I won't delve into that here, because it depends so heavily on preference and situation. Lack of disruption: First, avoid music with vocals. Having another voice going on in the background makes it almost impossible for my ...

I would recommend starting with one or two tracks that you already know and like that you think are suitable, then use any of the number of music services such as Spotify, Last.Fm, Pandora or Musicovery that can provide further suggestions based on these tracks. The reason I suggest this rather than a specific playlist is that they provide you with the ...

For my own games, I've found that the orchestral versions of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd work very well as baseline soundtracks. (High action fantasy and dreamy surrealism, respectively.) From there, I tend to go with ambient music like Scorn or C17H19NO3 for horror games, new age like David Arkenstone (fantasy), Dead Can Dance (fantasy horror), or Sheila ...

There's even dedicated software for this. An example (that a quick googling for "sound effects music rpg" also brings up, along with a number of other options) is The RPG Soundmixer, which seems to have a tryout demo - but I'm sure there are free alternatives as well. As for the specific questions: We've tried this and occasionally still use it. It needs ...

So the Order 66 Podcast has done a few episodes about using background music and sound effects in their games. Episode 103 has one of the audio guys from LucasArts talking about how to incorporate music into your games. I remember some earlier episodes that dealt with sound boards, sound software and sound effects... but can't remember what they are. ...

I wrote an application for doing this kind of thing: RPG Ambience. It's an HTML5 app that works in at least the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. At this point it's intended to be controlled with the keyboard, which is pretty handy and fast if you have a limited selection of sounds. I'm working on a visual playback interface that ...

I played in a game where the GM used http://www.freesound.org/ for sound effects related to things like taverns/sewers/fight down the street/etc and it didn't seem to add anything to the game. to be fair, the game was heavily on rails to the point where we once found a way to & decided to go through a wall to get around a magical forcefield thing in a ...

Has anyone tried this before, how did it turn out? Tried it once. Worked out amazingly, although don't underestimate the amount of work required. But if your players are wanting immersion or are very aural people, this will make the game that much more fun for them. When I did it, I didn't have a sound for everything - a few especially creaky doors, a ...

We created an iOS application just for that, called DMDJ. DMDJ features a sophisticated audio engine, as well as a number of environmental presets and music themes, aimed at improving the experience of a pen&paper session, by allowing DMs to create audio environments for their players. In short, main features include: An audio engine, with complete ...

I have been using sound and music in my game for 8 years. I have used The RPG Soundmixer, for 8 years through 2 different versions. Yeah, it's a german product, but no software has been able to offer the features it has in 8 years. To the person who said, it's not worth the trouble, i disagree. Immersion is everything. RPGsoundmixer access to all music or ...

I haven't tried adding sounds to my games, but I certainly have tried adding background music. This means that I don't have to queue up each track separately, but I can instead throw it all in a playlist and leave it playing happily on its own. If I want different kinds of music for different atmospheres and places, I create separate playlists and swap them ...

I have used it before, but I don't commonly. IMHO, the three most common mistakes I've seen when people use music are that they turn the volume up too loud, that they choose songs that will distract themselves or other players, and they feel compelled to fiddle with the song selection during the session. I personally define "too loud" as anything that I ...

One of our GM's collected a bunch of songs he thought would fit certain situations. He had them on his phone to play at key moments (death of a boss, etc.) I thought it was a failure because, even if I knew the song, I couldn't enjoy or even identify it because of the clipping (high volume setting on a very small speaker) and the three excited ...

We never used music to set the tone or anything like that, but we always had some album on in the background. Some of my favourite memories of Roleplaying are evoked when I listen to an old album (Guns and Roses - Appetite for Destructions, Mary Coughlan - Tired and Emotional, Cure - Love Cats - I'm aging myself here) and I remember a particular RPG ...

I've tuned a Pandora station. A bit of classical, a bit of matrixy stuff, string quartet covers of metal/rock tunes and some instrumental/electronic. It works pretty well, and I've been tuning it long enough that I almost never have to thumbs down a song anymore. When I get back to some serious GMing I think I'm going to split it into three stations "upbeat ...

Music can be a great addition to any RP session. However, keeping an appropriate choice and volume of the music is essential. One DM I've played with in some D&D sessions likes to keep his iPhone handy with various movie soundtracks. Of course, the music of John Williams (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.) is a common and very effective feature.

I’ve never enjoyed soundtracks for the sake of soundtracks. But when the PCs ended up in 1969 San Francisco, I did create a soundtrack for them, of action-appropriate music (to the best of my ability) that was also music from the period. The difference between this and “mood music” is that this was music the player characters were hearing, if not at exactly ...

Music, despite being a soundtrack to the story if You fit it well, reduces distractions as GM and players hear less sonds from the surrounding world. Music is for players ears what a candle is for the eyes. It keeps focus/attention and helps building the atmosphere. [I'm not a WoD kind of guy - the candles helped me while playing good old fantasy] ...