The Best Fluffy Pancakes recipe you will fall in love with. Full of tips and tricks to help you make the best pancakes.
How to Be a Better Dungeon Master Through Strategic Sound Design
Syrinscape delivers a massive library of more than 75,000 individual unique samples, including more than 5,000 music tracks, all lovingly mixed into 9000+ ambiances (what Syrinscape calls Moods). Syrinscape’s 9000+ Moods support every moment of exploration, adventure and peril in dozens of official adventures from Dungeons & Dragons & Pathfinder to Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk Red, Starfinder, Everyday Heroes and many more, but let’s stick to just Dungeons & Dragons for this blog (and Pathfinder) since these are the most commonly played games.
Syrinscape’s amazing software solutions can deliver sound to your table on your phone or tablet via the Syrinscape apps, or to your friends playing anywhere in the world via the browser-based Web Player, whether you are controlling it directly with Syrinscape’s bespoke interface or via one of the handy integrations with your VTT of choice – there are official Syrinscape integrations with Fantasy Grounds and Foundry VTT, and community based solutions for most other VTTs: such as Kenku FM, for routing Syrinscape’s sound through Discord.
Syrinscape has so much to offer for Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder players, unlockable via individual purchases or via one of the subscriptions, starting at just $7.15 per month. Getting sound right is one of the most important tabletop gaming strategies the best Dungeon Masters and Game Masters use to create incredible gaming experiences for their players.
But…
Sometimes a lot of content is a lot of content! If I’m just beginning to level up my Dungeon Master skills, where do I start? What are the Top 10 most important sound effects in Syrinscape that every Dungeon Master needs to switch their Dungeons & Dragons roleplay up to 11?!
Top 10 Sound Effects for Immersive Tabletop RPG Sessions
I’m going to show you how to find these 10 most important sound effects in the Syrinscape apps. We’ll assume you have grabbed a Syrinscape Dungeons & Dragons subscription or Pathfinder subscription for just $7.15 per month, which unlocks ALL fantasy content in the Syrinscape apps.
1. Bustling Tavern (for adventure hooks and social encounters)
A Bustling Tavern is the most important starting location for many adventures and a safe, warm, and often slightly sticky homebase for the party. We’ll need the warm chatter of commoners, the clink of bottles, perhaps a bard plying their trade by a welcomingly crackling fire. Typing “Tavern” into the Fantasy Player or into SEARCH at the top right of the Web Player will reveal a number of taverns, each with its own flavour (get it..? …flavour… like beer?!?).
Note how I have filtered for “SoundSets” so I can click straight through to the SoundSet I like the look of (with the little blue link) and get some sound going. This search has revealed taverns of all kinds from friendly to seedy each with a uniquely flavoured music track and even revealed a fully voiced NPC SoundSet that lets your players interact with a tavern keep and… oo… there’s a tavern brawl in there too… that may well be useful!
2. Forest wilderness (for the journey there)
There are dozens of forests and woods in Syrinscape of every imaginable flavor. See a search here in the Syrinscape Fantasy Player app for “forest” which reveals a couple of forests built into encounter SoundSets like the Pathfinder Dryad shown. You can also see there’s a “forest” forest, but also an Icy environment for when you want to freeze your players’ toes off with frostbite. I wonder, are snow dryads a thing…?
3. Roar of battle (killing the thing before it kills you)
Like the Dryad encounter above, Syrinscape brings support for more than 360 specific monsters. I made a word cloud to fit just some of their names in a pic for you. There are so many, making an alphabet song with them is easy: the Aboleth, Beholder, Carrion Crawler, Draconian, Ettercap, Flameskull, Gelatinous cube, Hag, Invisible stalkers, Jabberwock, Kenku, Lich, Manticore, Nothic, Owlbear, Plesiosaurus, Quickling, Red dragon, Sahuagin, Troll, Umber hulk, Vrock, Wererat, Xorn, Yuan-ti, Zombie. Simply type in the way you are trying to kill your Player Characters today, add the word “battle” and Syrinscape will pump out some fine combat music tracks and some truly hideous monster growls and roars!
4. Creepy Dungeon Ambiance (for making everyone uncomfortable)
When it comes to Game Master skills, keeping your players engaged can be one of the biggest challenges (I’m looking at you, Nathan), and there’s nothing quite so effective at pulling your players attention to the story you are telling like making your players feel genuinely uncomfortable. That’s where Syrinscape’s various dungeon ambiances come into play. Syrinscape’s dungeons are created by first laying a foundation of deep subtle wind, and then adding in various occasional seriously disturbing sounds, everything from weird distant noises, sudden rockfalls, deep unidentifiable growls and the skittering of far too identifiable insects, or how about the tortured howls and screams of someone falling in a spiked pit trap… ouch!
5. City Soundscapes (everyone likes to go shopping sometimes)
Maybe an urban adventure is more to your liking. One of the joys of creating Syrinscape’s official sounds for Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder and Call of Cthulhu and Cyberpunk Red has been the chance to develop the specific hubbub for a rich variety of famous beloved urban locations, from Baldur’s Gate, to Magnimar, from real world Victorian London to Starfinder’s Absalom Station. Syrinscape has worked with the amazing creative teams of these games to find the special things that make each location unique and rich. Syrinscape has collected the voices of Wizards of the Coast creatives to create unique crowd walla sounds. We have also spent years recording Gen Con attendees for snippets of passing city dweller conversations, halfling hawker cries flogging religious trinkets of Golarion gods and honed the peculiar sounds of Elturel, full of fire and screaming as the entire city is dragged into the depths of Avernus. Quite the job!
6. On the High Seas (there’s nothing like a Pirate Arrrgh!)
When your improvisation techniques for D&D high sea adventures are mainly saying “Arrr”, “Arrgh”, “Yarr”, and “Gar”, Syrinscape feels you. We have a whole SoundSet full of that kind of stuff, PLUS the rollicking piratical music tracks that will have your players feeling like they’ve got the sea legs of a First Sea Lord of the English navy in no time! Have a listen:
7. Horror Soundtrack (horrible for good reason)
I’ve already discussed in The Psychology of Audio in Tabletop Gaming: How Soundscapes Transform Tabletop Adventures just how important the soundtrack is in a horror game, for evoking powerful emotional responses and immersing your players in your stories.
In this video from more than 8 years ago, past-Ben discusses some of the things he learnt about constructing horror soundscapes while building the sounds for Paizo’s nasty horror themed “Strange Aeons” adventure path.
Most interesting in this video is the concept of the “frequency gap” between high pitched and low pitched elements in the sound design. This video also nicely shows off how much flexibility Syrinscape brings to the table with its capacity to easily control each Element of the sound design separately. With Syrinscape, you can quickly and easily adjust the soundtrack as your RPG storytelling develops through the course of a gaming session.
8. Spell Sounds (magic missile, fireball, cure, Mordenkainen’s magnificent mansion)
Allow me to paint a scene, and slip in what I think is one of the best Game Master tips for storytelling and player immersion at the gaming table. Sheila (she’s an Australian) has been waiting for her turn for about five minutes as each of her fellow players have placed themselves at increasingly ridiculous amounts of peril, including Bruce (he’s Australian) playing a barbarian on 3 hit points. Sheila (the slang term is derived from the Irish name Síle, pronounced SHEE-la) did have marvelous plans to nova on damage, creating an enormous explosion of blades and decapitation… but… healing… really… “looks like I will heal everyone again”. How do we make Sheila feel awesome? Syrinscape has your back! A quick search filtering by OneShots and you are ready. As Sheila brings the perfect combo of all available actions, feats and equipment, you trigger a bloom of radiant holy shining audio that momentarily dominates the room. Suddenly, instead of people experiencing the last six seconds of action as a few clunking dice and a new number in a box, the whole table is imagining the cleric (Sheila) wreathed in light, power streaming from her holy symbol and her blond hair (Sheila’s characters are always blond) whipping in a holy-wind-machine-of-awesomeness! Sheila feels great, you look like the best Dungeon Master ever and everyone has a memorable moment. For me, that’s how to engage players in Dungeons & Dragons, with just the right sound at just the right moment!
9. Victory Stings (for when everything goes right)
You know the story… when a player makes the save in that clinch moment; when the last of 250 hit points are finally taken from a monster, along with its head; or when a long campaign reaches its ultimate perfect conclusion. Syrinscape comes with a bevy of free content, which you can use without even signing up for an account. As well as 15 free SoundSets from a range of different genres including Dungeons & Dragons, Call of Cthulhu and various Sci-fi games, the Syrinscape team cycles through a range of different other free content every week. Syrinscape releases new content almost every single week of the year and we usually make these sounds free to everyone for the whole of the release week. So head to the Web Player or download one of the apps to see what is free to play today.
Most importantly, always free with Syrinscape is a “Victory” OneShot ready for every special, brilliant moment you create at the gaming table!
10. The Wilhelm Scream (IMHO the most important sound of all)
It’s all well and good to celebrate your players’ best moments, but no matter how I am using sound effects in tabletop RPGs, I always have this sound available. The Wilhelm Scream first appeared in the 1951 film “Distant Drums”, but has since become the most-essential-of-movie-sound-design-memes, making its presence felt in more than 400 films since, including every Star Wars film that matters. It was a day of great joy when I discovered this sound effect had entered the public domain, and thus could be slotted into Syrinscape’s vast library of sound effects. As soon as you grab a Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Sci-fi or SuperSyrin subscription, the Wilhelm Scream appears in your global OneShots, ensuring it’s available at every critical moment! Don’t play Tabletop RPGs without this most vital of sound effects at your fingertips! Seriously. If I could give you just ONE piece of Tabletop RPG advice, it would be to aim to deploy the Wilhelm Scream at the absolute perfect moment in a gaming session. You’ll have your players in stitches and talking about that moment for years to come!
So there you have it, the 10 most important sound effects to have available in any gaming session, and Syrinscape can bring them all to the table quickly and easily, ensuring that whether you’re improvising or playing official published adventures you’ll always have the tools you need to create immersive RPG experiences your players will love.
There’s lots more Dungeon Master tips and Tabletop RPG advice coming to this blog, and some fun and silly things too, so make sure you have checked “Yes” on your Syrinscape Dashboard , so we can let you know when there is something new to read here.
In the meantime, may your dice rolls be brilliant, your stories memorable, and your games… LOUD!
