Creating Cinematic RPG Experiences: A Guide to Using Music and Sound Effects

The Power of Sound in Tabletop RPGs

The right roleplaying game (RPG) background music can switch a tabletop RPG session from “Meh” to epic! But getting the right sound effects for just the right mood and setting can be a challenge. As already discussed in my blog article “The Psychology of Audio in Tabletop Gaming”, the right sound effects and music can play a powerful role in immersing your players, setting the tone, and pushing the story forward, but the wrong sound or musical moment (leitmotif) at the wrong time can pull everyone out of the action in an instant. Sound effects can be a powerful tool to trigger cue emotions, and RPG background music that is specific, appropriate and unique to your game can help a story feel like it truly belongs to just you and your players. So how do we get that right? Read on!

Essential Tools for Creating a Cinematic RPG Experience

RPG Background Music – Setting the Scene

Music can be an effective shortcut for orienting our imaginations to the genre, look and feel of a game world. Over the last hundred years, cinema has developed a shorthand for matching music styles to genres. Just listen to these three short tracks and note how they each elicit a specific image.

You may have listened to each sample above for just a mere moment, but perhaps you were instantly transported to: a gritty epic “Lord of the Rings fantasy world”, a “neon-light filled Cyberpunk streetscape”, and a “1920s car chase’. I’ll leave it up to you to guess which was which.

So where can a Dungeon Master (DM) find RPG background music to enhance their game; we’ll talk about ambiance later. For many a DM, the first port of call will be Spotify and YouTube playlists, and this is indeed a rich vein for those whose budget is slim.

Spotify works reasonably well. Search for:

• “Fantasy RPG music” under playlists
• or “Baldur’s Gate soundtrack”
• Or “Elder Scrolls V”

These playlists and albums will give you an instant, precooked bed of immersive RPG music for your table, though if you’ve read my previous blog, you’ll know these playlists come along with a few built-in issues.

• For me the biggest issue with choosing a Spotify Playlist for my RPG background music is the way these wander fairly randomly from one ‘mood’ to another. One moment the energy is mysterious and explorative, the next a high energy track plays that would work well for combat. It can be hard to control and contour the mood.
• Worse still (and for me a bit of a deal breaker for RPG immersive audio) is the inclusion in many of these playlists of music with lyrics. Tabletop RPGs are a talking game and having lyrics impinging on the game makes it hard for everyone to concentrate on each other and the stories we are trying to tell.
• Lastly, without a subscription, ads will definitely ruin your experience, so you’ll want to be investing enough to turn off those ads, so these aren’t actually necessarily the budget option they seem. Of course, maybe you have already paid for Spotify for other music, so using these at the gaming table isn’t actually an extra cost, but it’s still not technically free, right?

YouTube can be a good option too (suffering from the same kinds of issues as Spotify), but with one extra NASTY addition.

• I’m going to assume that the reader doesn’t want to violate anyone’s copyright or steal royalty payments from composers or worse still direct ad revenue to people who have uploaded stolen music. I’m sure the reader is aware of various long duration YouTube videos containing music ripped from movie soundtracks or computer games. Remember, if we want to continue to enrich our options for RPG background music, Dungeon Masters (DMs) are going to have to be careful to reward those putting the creative effort into crafting RPG immersive audio for the games we love. Please do think about who will benefit when you stream the sound you are using at your table.

BUT the biggest problem I see with hoping that Spotify or YouTube will solve your RPG immersive audio needs is the problem I talk about in detail in my previous article “The Psychology of Audio in Tabletop Gaming”.To recap briefly here… playing songs strongly associated with a story that is NOT the story YOU are trying to tell will quickly break immersion, take people out of their characters and be less effective and affecting. What image does this music evoke in your mind?

I see only ONE thing when I hear this. It’s a great image, but not one that is likely to help me stay immersed in my homebrew D&D game story.

So what sources of RPG music are NOT soundtracks lifted from movies or computer games?

There are many 15-minute loops available, often beautifully crafted musical works specifically designed as RPG background music (i.e. no lyrics, consistent mood). The most obvious one of these is Tabletop audio, but there are also smaller players in this field, such as Plate Mail Games and Michael Ghelfi Studios and don’t forget those CDs we used to buy from Midnight Syndicate. One big advantages of these solutions is that they usually include ambient background sounds as well as music in their tracks. Many of the creators of 15-minute loops fund themselves through Patreons so you know you’ll be supporting the creatives who made the art while you enjoy them.

In my opinion, 15-minute loop tracks are a BIG step up in creating immersive audio for RPGs, especially because of the baked in sound effects. When I first started adding sound effects and music to my tabletop RPGs this was what I turned to, using music tracks of my own with ambiance constructed in a DAW (audio software). It was the issues I encountered with this solution that drove me to come up with the generative audio solution that ultimately became Syrinscape. Some of those issues include:

• Repetition fatigue. Human brains are built to recognise patterns. Nothing quite breaks immersion like a player picking up a certain pattern of “woof woof cacaw” occurring exactly every 15 minutes.

• Limited flexibility. Ambiance loop mp3s are not customisable. Imagine in your RPG town all the dogs have been eaten (by goblins probably). Your mp3 has no way of turning off the dog woofs that keep playing (magical undead dog ghosts?). In addition to that, depending on how many mp3s you can cobble together in your library, it does quickly become weird when every small village sounds precisely the same.

• No ability to tweak the mood.

What does your town sound like “Early in the morning”

or bustling with foot traffic,

or late in the night.

• Transition clunkiness. As with Spotify tracks or YouTube playlists it can be difficult to smoothly move your sound design with your story from one location to the next.
  
• The power of combinations (just how many variations of my 15 minute loop track am I going to need). Imagine there are 16 different basic kinds of locations where a battle might occur. Imagine you might want to add the razors etc of maybe 256 different types of monsters into those locations for a combat ambiance. To cover these possible combinations you’ll need 4096 mp3s straight up. Add in factors like: is it raining, is it daytime or nighttime, is it busy or quiet and that number quickly grows? Now you might want to choose what type of combat music you’d like in the mix. Do you want epic taiko drums, rich orchestral, retro-techno funk? As you keep adding additional elements in the number of individual mp3 variations you would need to effectively cover all the options grows exponentially. Might it not be better to have a system that can take a location and drop the sounds of a battle or the weather over the top of that?

Surely there’s a better way!? Something that could layer all these elements together as required?

Sound Effects for Tabletop RPGs – Bringing the World to Life

So, we now know we need something that can combine dynamic, randomized, continuous, crossfadable ambiance and rich, unique, lyric-less music, plus those other elements we mentioned above. What options are there that can do that?

There’s Syrinscape (the thing I made for my own table). Syrinscape has thousands of SoundSets, each packed with various Moods made up of all the sound design Elements you could wish for. If you are looking for a simple solution for RPG background music that does everything I have described just about any tabletop RPG then Syrinscape is definitely something you should be checking out. I would be remiss if I didn’t note here that you can try Syrinscape out for free, without even registering an account. You can try one of the downloadable apps or use the browser-based solution at app.syrinscape.com. Syrinscape gives you the ability to smoothly fade into a location, such as a gloomy dungeon, to tweak that dungeon by choosing one of the many pre-set Moods, or even adjusting the volume on any of the Elements or even bringing in your own samples. On top of that, Syrinscape will also let you trigger weapon and spell sounds as these events occur in your game. With Syrinscape you can take your medieval town, turn off the dogs (who we already established have all been eaten by goblins), add some light rain (at just the volume you want), and mix in an occasional distant explosion (“what in all the gods names is that?”). You can then save this pre-set (Syrinscape calls them MOODs) and have it ready for when your players finally get to where you’ve been trying to plot hook them to go. Then when the moment is right: trigger an explosion of fire and fear, change the music up to something pumping, add in the roars of a dragon and panicked toasted halflings and make your players VERY afraid indeed for their characters!

I recommend you try out Syrinscape as well as some of the other similar solutions like Ambient Mixer, Tabletop Audio’s SoundPad, myNoise and Dscryb’s Opus. None of these have the richness of Syrinscape’s library or control of Syrinscape’s UI, a couple of them look like maybe they are semi abandoned, but two of them are cheaper.

Creating Dynamic Soundscapes for RPGs

As you experiment with your various options for creating the perfect RPG background music and ambiance keep in mind that you’ll be looking for something that can dynamically respond to your needs as a Dungeon Master. For truly immersive RPG audio you’ll want something that allows you to easily add in spell effects, weapon sounds and perhaps even things like the Wilhelm Scream (every DM ALWAYS needs the Wilhelm Scream at their fingertips, right?). I will write in more detail about this sub topic in a future blog post, which I will link to here.

Customizing Your RPG Music Playlist for Maximum Impact

I will also go into more detail with this topic. Syrinscape allows you to import your own music tracks for use in your games, so I’ll link here to a whole lot of detail about how to identify the right tracks for: exploration, suspense, downtime, travel and of course combat. If you get your palette of available RPG background music balanced just right, it can be a powerful force for guiding players through the expectations you have for different phases of play. For example, I love having a long suspenseful session with tense, dark, foreboding music dominating the mood and then… hitting break time and being able to quickly break and dissipate that grim atmosphere by simply shifting the music I have been playing. I like it how the right music track helps to shift everyone out of gameplay and can remind us all to connect socially as well.

Implementing Sound in Your RPG Setup

Hardware & Software – What You Need

I’m also excited to share my knowledge about speaker setups and layouts for getting your RPG immersive audio to your players ears. Ensuring the music isn’t really loud for just one player, or jarring in tone colour, or filling up all the same frequencies of speech is really important for sound effects for tabletop RPGs (remember we want to be able to hear and understand each other easily). There has been a trend in modern TV and cinema where actors have become harder and harder to understand over the ambiance and music track, and this is NOT something I am keen to bring to the gaming table. I will link to another blog article here, as soon as I can get that written.

Live Sound Mixing for Maximum Immersion

Until I can write a detailed blog article about this topic, I will instead link you to Syrinscape’s Get Started page. I would highly recommend you take a look at the (first) three videos there. You’ll come away with a good idea about how I think about sound design, how I like to layer those different elements of immersive audio together as I described above. The cool thing about “Basic demo” video on that page is it uses just content that is completely FREE in the Syrinscape apps and Web Player. You won’t even need to register an account to be able to do what I do in that video.

Crafting an Unforgettable RPG Atmosphere

So, I feel like you’ve got a lot to think about there. Hopefully you’ve got a good start thinking about how you can use RPG background music and just the right immersive audio to help make your players feel like they are inside your game world, feeling the feelings their characters are feeling, rejoicing in the victories, and being chilled to the bone with dread!

In a future blog I will write lots more about combining sound effects and music with lighting and beautifully crafted handouts and props. For example, I use the beautifully crafted coins of Campaign Coins, so when my players receive treasure, they… REALLY receive treasure.

Conclusion – Elevating Your RPG Sessions with Audio

When Syrinscape first hit the big wide world in 2009, some people didn’t think immersive audio was a thing they needed in their tabletop RPGs, but much as sound and music became a norm in Cinema in just a few years after it appeared for the first time in the “Jazz Singer” (1927), now just about everyone takes it for granted that their table must have at the very least background music and ideally immersive audio that matches the story and action.

How much you have to spend, how much time you want to spend prepping and how central sound and music in RPGs is for you will affect which tool you choose to switch on your sound effects for your tabletop RPGs, but if you make the effort to find the tool that best suits your needs today, you won’t regret making the right choice… the right choice for me (of course) was something I built specifically for me, Syrinscape, the app that brings my table to life with beautiful, rich, immersive, consistent, easily controllable tabletop ambiance and music every time.

But, whatever choice you make, most importantly, game on… and… GAME LOUD!