Your Sessions Come To Life with a Legendary Soundtrack - A Guide to GM Music

We here at Apotheosis Studios love to tell stories. Our work in the worlds of TTRPG has been defined by the stories we want to tell. When we create our gaming table environments, telling tales for our friends and community.

There's been a lot of talk about the things you can bring to your table. This blog is filled with the many kinds of new monster, items to outfit your characters, and places for them to go. Game Masters who are savvy with the rule systems they play with will always find ways to build new content for their games. I always encourage Game Masters to brew new things for their games.

But say you're a Game Master and you've worked tirelessly to build new material and hooks for your campaign. Your minis will be dry by the time the players come and the battle maps are drawn and ready. Now how do you make the game feel the part?

Music Sets the Scene

It's December now, and those of us who have Spotify open when they work would know they listen to quite a bit of music. It's a strange and eclectic report I've been given by the elves inside that app. Music is an immersive way to set the tone of where you are and what you're doing, and it's strange for there not to be something atmospheric underscoring the TV and movies we watch.

Why should our games be any different?

I've been using background music in many of my own games, and it adds a level of cinematic flair to your games. It's an added layer of work to your game but makes for great effect.

Bards using their music can change the tide of battle, just like you, dear GM - ‘Field Musicians‘ by SIXMOREVODKA

Setting the Score

I know when I first started Game Mastering, I know I mostly turned on my sound system and played movie soundtracks. Lord of the Rings and the Marvel Cinematic Universe were some of the early choices. LotR has the benefit of the high fantasy genre callbacks, as well as the right mixture of subdued and light, as well as grand and heroic. The tone of the song is very important – I'll talk about that in a moment.

It's easy to just let an album like that play on repeat in the background. It's what I did when I started, but there's so much more that can be done when you put in a little work with it.

For the music I use in my games, I try to cover a lot of bases. There's more than just one tone or mood you can give in a certain situation.

I've designed, built, and worked in my setting for well over seven years. It has an extensive history that spans thousands of years, and the different geographic locations in the world. Finding different kinds of music that fit these locations was a very fun challenge. The world we live in has a wide spread of cultures, and they usually inspire how we imagine parts of our own world. It's hard to not imagine Dwarves with a Scottish drawl.

Your musicians match the music - and they Inspire your games - ‘Tragic Poet‘ by Edvan Soares

We can actually take Dwarves as an example. In my own setting, the Dwarves mirror what we would consider Scottish or Celtic in one part of the world, but in another, I mirror them on Vikings or other Scandinavian cultures.

For moments when a party of adventurers are trekking through the tunnels and caves beneath a great range of mountains, something quiet with a lot of base and ambient strings play. It needs to feel cold and gloomy, a little frightening. They can proudly claim Dark Vision all they want, but that's always going to be a gloomy environment. When they enter the great underground caverns, then the musical tone changes greatly. Something grand and echoey, with lots of horns and strings can perfectly underscore the narration you give about the impossibly high cavern vaulting upwards. A low, understated moment in the song can be for a moment that a player kneels down to inspect the intricate, near microscopic details the Dwarves have carved into such a pillar.

When the party wanders into the great hall of the Dwarf lords that live down here, that's when the details start to show through, and can really help the tone of your story. A generic Dwarf playlist may have something grand and heroic, with bagpipes and reed guitars playing, but would that tone fit if the last king under the mountain has just died? Perhaps a classic Viking funerary song would fit far better here, describe a non-Dwarf Bard performing the song you're playing but the party are hearing from a corner to the side. The lively drinking songs of these two cultures are both very different, in our world and theirs.

The different cultures of Dwarves I use feature Celtic music, lots of pipes and flutes in some locations; compared to the throat singing and bassy horns and drums of more traditional Scandinavian songs. Tracks with a more subdued but strong tones can greatly affect how the scene feels.

If you know the setting you play in well enough to have a culture mirror between your locations, having accompanying music really builds up great atmosphere.

An idea for musical supplements you can use is a theme song. Some specific track to play when an NPC is a focus, or a party theme when they do something heroic or are in danger. Moments like these feel like a great needle drop moment like in the movies, and gives the character being emphasised a lot of weight for good or bad.

On the Right Soundtrack

Breaking down a location into battle music, ambient music, and tense music usually works very well for me. They can be as long or as short as you need it. A ten minute version of a song that fits the location perfectly can be looped to do the job just fine. A few quick, similar tracks are also excellent. As long as it's not too repetitive on your players, then they can let the musical journey move around them.

Now we have some ideas for what we could make our playlists be like, we can begin scouring the internet for music sources. Obvious places like Youtube, Spotify, and Soundcloud are excellent sources and great places to start looking. Do remember to keep all your playlists and songs saved in the same place. It's incredibly bad for the player's immersion if you suddenly have to pause the music to switch playlists on a different site to change tone or location. Bonus points if you somehow save all the audios and play them through from one place.

As I said earlier, fantasy film and TV soundtracks are usually great places to start for inspiration. Electro funk and obscure dubstep are excellent picks for your scifi themed games. It's also a chance to showcase artists you and your friends have never really heard of. Here are some of my quick picks:

For location matters playlists: the Civilisation games have songs to symbolise each country you can play as in game, for both peacetime and war. This is a great spread of cultures in both ambient and aggressive situations. Civilisation 5 (as well as being one of the best games in history) has an excellent soundtrack that you can find on Youtube here.

For general fantasy music: Fantasy & World Music by the Fiechters are excellent and provide many examples in tracks ranging from two to twenty minutes. Find their channel right here.

For grand, dramatic music for combat encounters and reveals of the BBEG, channels like Two Steps from Hell and Epic Music World will always be channels I can recommend for the truly cinematic.

music in TTRPGs can be wildly different depending how you play, bring the noise to level up your play - ‘Chempunk Shredder’ by SIXMOREVODKA

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This advice works very well for your home games. If you stream your TTRPG goodness like the fine people at Gilding Light or my friends No Ordinary Heroes and BiscuitTinRPG, then you have to go to the extra search of finding the music that is royalty and copyright free. The work of Fesliyan Studios offers copyright free fantasy music for all kinds of use.

Once you have them all saved together in one place, saved into this location for calm, tense, and in battle, now you have to wonder how to play it. In my case, I have a fairly good music setup. My stereo produces grand surround sound and has everything ready to go once linked to my phone. I know not every Game Master will have such a setup, and there's many ways to get around it. A good speaker, turned down to a volume just quieter than speaking placed in the middle of your table is usually good. If you don't use your phone when you play, putting it behind you with a cup over the speaker also works surprisingly well.

Go forth, armed with symphonies to bring a new level of story to your stories.

Now we want to hear from you. Will you be bringing a musical sensation to your upcoming games? What kind of tracks do you use when you GM your tabletop role playing games? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.