Lots of us who run games use music to help set mood, tone and evoke the scene. I really appreciate that some designers include original music scores with virtual tabletop assets. Not all players like background scores, some find it distracting or an impediment to playing if they have hearing difficulties. Fortunately, the virtual table programs that I prefer, Foundry and Roll20, allows each user to set their own music levels.
When I sit down to create, while there are times that I’ll create with nothing more than sound of the breeze or the natural sounds of the day (or night, or very, very late night), more often than not, I’m playing some music that taps into the mood and tone I’m hoping to evoke. In my recent campaigns, I’ve focused on getting back to that pillar of adventure: exploration. Deep woods, forested foothills and foreboding mountains are in the future for my players; filled with the savage and weird. My music of choice? Bands like Wardruna, Heilung and Danheim. These bands produce renditions of Nordic folk and the like. Give me those drums, horns, jaw harps and primal sounds! Music just helps ignite the imagination, and sometimes, the music just makes a scene pop into my head, and I just let the internal camera roll and see the scene, and how it plays out, and put it to paper, and then it makes contact with my players and who knows where they take it?
Sometimes, when I’m running a game online, I’ll play music real low through my headphones. It’s like a little fuse to ignite the narrative of the story, and I’ll add a scene or encounter that I hadn’t planned before, just rolling where the music takes me, and enjoying how the player interacts with it, and seeing where we take it.
The obvious analogy is it’s a lot like jazz. But I’m not going there, because (now don’t hate me for it) I’m not into jazz. The only time I might sit down and listen to jazz is when I’m working on the background of a Vampire: The Masquerade NPC (or Storyteller Played Character ‘SPC’ as they’re called in Vampire 5th Edition) who might listen to jazz or lived their mortal days during the Jazz age of the 20s and 30s. And I’m bound to make that vampire despised by the PCs, so they’ll eat that sucker, Blood Hunt be damned! Yeah. Jazz is not my thing. But I’ll settle for calling my fusion of music inspired writing the ska-punk method.
When you’re sitting down to create, what music do you choose or do you prefer the quiet? Does it change with the genre? What bands compel your muse? Post some of your inspirations, even if it is jazz.