In the Official Series Bible Core Book, I want to make suggestions on putting together a soundtrack for your game. A style of music for a setting, to be sure, but also putting together specific songs or tracks for specific moods and types of scenes. A theme song, indicating the game’s starting and table talk should stop. A closing theme, indicating the game’s over. Songs for combat scenes. Theme songs for specific characters, when there’s a scene with them in the spotlight. Love themes. Tension themes. All sorts of things.
What slots do you think should be called out, that are universal to all genres and settings? What song queues need to be considered for a well-rounded soundtrack.
This is an area where legal and creative considerations could clash. I’d like to offer up some suggestions on my choices for soundtracks on specific Official Series Bible settings, and maybe even link to someplace where the songs could be legally purchased and downloaded. I’m not sure if putting such a list into the setting document itself would be legal, or ethical, but I’m not certain why; I’ll easily plug books in a bibliography, or game systems that will pair well with a setting, so how is this different? Would a suggested playlist be better on the AJ website, instead of in the setting book?
I’m interested in opinions here, both in soundtrack use and presentation.
If you feel that a particular song or theme is a good fit for worldbuilding or a particular type of scene in a game, then I see no reason not to provide a link or other directions on how and where to obtain a copy of the theme in question. It just makes it that much easier on the reader to try out what you’re writing about.
There are a lot of ridiculous laws out there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some legal hoops to jump through. But, as far as it being ethical, I see no reason NOT to do it and every reason TO do it. And, if through the link you get a little bit of advertising kick-back from the purchase, more power to you I say. You’re not forcing someone to buy the product, just facilitating and making a recommendation based on a shared topic of interest.
I think using music to evoke a mood in a game is problematic because that music may already have different and unwanted associations for everyone who hears it. There’s the risk, with soundtracks for example, that you’ll just evoke the source for everyone, like a musical version of that single Monty Python reference that derails the game for fifteen minutes.
That said, I like your idea of using music as themes. Friends and I have experimented with leitmotif (Ooh, pretentious!) and sometimes it works. It can be great as foreshadowing or as a push for players. You’re at a crossroads trying to decipher your map when you hear the first ominous notes of the orc theme. Time to move on.
We never got it to work with combat because, man alive, combat takes forever. Turns out that exciting battle music gets absurd after three hours. Or you play it for the first three minutes of combat and the rest is silence. Then again, combat itself is only stays exciting for the first three minutes before it becomes a three hour chore. Note to game designers: make combat faster. Like, orders of magnitude faster. It’s never going to be realistic, thank God, so just make it quick.
Anyway. I guess the only useful input I’ve got is that I’ve found musical themes to be very difficult to use for characters, almost impossible to use for activities of arbitrary duration, but very very effective to use for setting the mood of places, especially a recurring location. The bar theme. The eerie but not overtly dangerous cavern theme. The king’s court theme. The bridge of the starship with a huge window looking out at the wonders of the universe theme.
It works well for times too, as in, you stumble across a ruin or artifact of the Ancient Civilization and you get the Ancient Civilization theme. Remember: always trick your players into thinking your world has a detailed multilayered history.
In the end, I think you’ve got a good idea to make it an online resource and drop a link into the PDFs. That makes it a kind of unobtrusive module, it’s easy to ignore for those who want to, and you are free to update, edit, and expand it into other “additional materials”.
I always wanted to use music in my games to help set the mood but could never quite work it in without it coming across as cheesy or it getting forgotten in the background. Using themes for PLACES though is a great idea. Then you can set it and forget it until they move to a new area.
What I’m ultimately going to do is create a support page on the AJ site for each product, where I can update resource links and perhaps foster some discussion.