If you’ve ever walked into a store or restaurant and the music was off, you know how important it is to set the mood and give atmosphere to a place. Role-playing games can be the same way. For a basic dungeon crawl, throwing on some Dragonforce in the background might suffice, but if you’r running something more cosmic…..more horrific…..more mysterious, then selecting the proper background music can make the difference between a scene being genuinely creepy, or genuinely forgettable.
In addition to helping with individual scenes, having music can help set the mood and get everyone in the right head space for a game. Of course when everyone sits at the table there will be banter, laughter, phones, and probably some YouTube videos. Hitting play on your soundtrack a few minutes before you start the game while you’re getting your last minute prep together can cue everyone in that it’s time to start thinking about the horrors ahead.
With these things in mind, here are some resources for adding that extra something to your game.
Midnight Syndicate
The group and website known as Midnight Syndicate may be the most well known RPG soundtrack maker out there thanks to their 2003 release of the Dungeons & Dragons: Official Role-playing Soundtrack. Their work isn’t free of course, but it’s top-notch quality and almost always leans towards the creepy.
Toxic Bag Productions
Now available at DriveThruRPG, this group started making sound effects CDs in the mid 90’s. Their work includes board game sound tracks, game master music collections, soundpacks, and even sound apps. They have both free and paid material.
Tabletop Audio
This is one of my personal favorites; a free website full of 10 minute audio loops themed for every occasion. From fantasy to modern this place has you covered. You can queue up as many different loops as you want and they have a lot of horror themes. My favorite part of the website though is the SoundPad. The SoundPad is a web based sound board full of sound effects that you can control WHILE YOU’RE GAMING. Want everyone to know there is something scratching at the door? Just hit the Scrape button and done, there it is in real-time. Having their music on loop while manually controlling the SoundPad makes a game a whole new experience. It takes a little getting used to using it in the middle of a game, but well worth it.
The Nameless Festival
This one is a very specific fan made collection geared towards the beloved board game Arkham Horror. It is a nice mix of 1920’s jazz and flapper music that may suddenly turn into garbled screaming only to have the “record” scratch back into ragtime and the Lindy Hop.
That’s all we have this time, if you want to share any excellent music resources for setting the mood in your horror games, drop Simeon a line and put Unspeakable! in the title.