gothwalk | Soundtracking

Something I've been considering doing for games is putting together soundtracks for specific locations and specific moods I want to set.

Moods aren't hard, but locations are. I'm not looking for "music you would hear in this location", but "music that fits the feeling of this location".

Places I definitely want to have lists for:

Baator (lawful, evil, hell)
Ysgard (chaotic, good - Norse gods and the like)
Sigil (the city between the planes, half-alien, half-familiar, jaded, cynical, cosmopolitan)
Haelthan (think of Philip Pullman's Cambridge crossed with Medieval Paris - a university town, jammed to the rafters with wizards and scholars, a place everyone goes at some point)
Setting (Helsinki/Galway - coastal, a calm city at the heart of a trading empire, with a very long history and many long-standing traditions)
Velarin (London-like city, byzantine politics, and almost all trade in the continent goes through it - or used to until very recently)
Windhowl (an academy of necromancers and summoners, pretty much evil to the core, but very civilised, if alien)
The Moon Road (a plane/planar pathway, from which dreams can be seen and stepped into)

There'll probably be more posts like this in the future, too. What I'm looking for are actual tracks, rather than just bands - ideally, I'd like to know the track, the band and the album I can get it from. And then I shall start on putting CDs together. Suggestions?

(I have to credit

shadesong with some of the movement towards getting these lists together; she's posting what's effectively a soundtrack to the movie of herself at a rate of two tracks every weekend.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

consider bands like:

- ERA
- Clannad
- Qntal
- Adaro
- In extremo

look for some trance/industrial stuff

Nightwish definitely and look at The Gathering as well.

Do you want instrumental/not-predominantly-lyrical?

I've been listening to FourTet lately - ambient electronica, basically. "My Angel Rocks Back And Forth" off the album "Rounds" might be good for Setting - it's peaceful with a hint of interesting depths ( :) ) and a sort of gentle sway like the sea.

And then there's most of Sigur Ros's album-with-no-name. Track 3 would be great for the Moon Road.

More will probably occur to me later...

Sigur Ros - isn't the album with no name called () ?

Yes, but I thought there were too many brackets in that post already :)

Moon Road: Jean Michel Jarre. Tangerine Dream.

Ysgard: Wagner, who else? But nothing so cheesy as RotV. Also, if you can find it, there's a CD called "Jazz Wolf" under the Northsound label. Mellow Jazz, interspliced with wolf packs howling. Great background music.

Setting: Afro-Celt Sound System

Haelthan: Dead Can Dance

If you have Planescape: Torment, you can rip out all the music and stuff for all the areas :)
If you don't, let me know and I'll sort you out a CD full of the music of the game for your perusal :)

My first question would be..do you want a lief motif running through all of them?

I think not. I want places to be distinct. I'll take care of motifs in the described visuals.

The Silent Hill series has great atmospheric spooky music, given the dreamlike quality of the games it might not be a bad choice for a couple of the planes.

The LOTR soundtracks are good if you mix them around a bit and the Final Fantasy series of games, particularly the later ones (8 onwards in general) have some good stuff. Also,

metalrabbit recently inherited a huge load of classical CDs that I'll me MP3-ifying soon, once I've done that I can burn you a CD or two of them.

I have Torment. I shall go digging through it shortly now. Cheers!

Jaded, cynical, cosmopolitan - try some Divine Comedy from the Casanova album. Perhaps Alfie.

DC may also be good sources for Windhowl though I think for civilised nastiness, it has hard to beat Tindersticks, especially the song I can't remember but is about a sister.

Ysgard - try some Scandinavian dance music. Maybe Royksopp.

Moon road, almost anything by Sigur Ros - http://www.sigur-ros.com/ for samples.

You run a Planescape campaign? Woot!

I never actually use music, but if I did, I've said many times that Amnesiac is my illithid soundtrack. It is the music of mind flayers. (It's also very creepy and inhuman.)

It's mainly Prime, in the terms of the Planescape setting, but it wanders all across the planes on a regular basis; it's Epic level, so plane-hopping is just something the characters do.

There's also Anuna, Usume Taiko, Kitaro and Mike Oldfield.

Yeah I have some of all of the above.

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Vocal is only bad if the lyrics are very clear. They Might Be Giants, for instance, would be very bad. Something where they're not clear, or not comprehensible to anyone in the room (most sean-nos, Deep Forest</>, etc.) is fine.

I would have said that sigil would be more suited to a recording of dozens of angry howler monkeys all being prodded and poked at the same time, at least until PCs got used to the wrongness of the place.

So that's where WWE got the idea from :-P

Whee! I'm an inspiration!

- Baator (lawful, evil, hell)
Death Metal (no idea of band names, sorry!)

- Ysgard (chaotic, good - Norse gods and the like)
Any drumming-for-meditation CDs; Herbert Groenemeyer.

- Sigil (the city between the planes, half-alien, half-familiar, jaded, cynical, cosmopolitan)
1980’s music, the synthesiser stuff.

- Haelthan (think of Philip Pullman's Cambridge crossed with Medieval Paris - a university town, jammed to the rafters with wizards and scholars, a place everyone goes at some point)
The faster songs from Medieval Baebes. The “Interview with a Vampire” soundtrack. The Messiah by Handle (sp?).

- Setting (Helsinki/Galway - coastal, a calm city at the heart of a trading empire, with a very long history and many long-standing traditions)
Enya/Clannad; the slower Mozart pieces, especially for the piano; Irish trad music with a woman singing (Dolores Kane etc)

- Windhowl (an academy of necromancers and summoners, pretty much evil to the core, but very civilised, if alien)
Music with a strong, deep bass. The funeral march by Wagner; the funeral mass by Mozart. Some of the more “threatening” Enya pieces (there is one in particular I am thinking of, from Memories of Trees, but I cannot remember the name).

- The Moon Road (a plane/planar pathway, from which dreams can be seen and stepped into)
“Tubular Bells”, especially if the dreams are a bit creepy. Or Classical, especially Palestrina; or whale songs.

For Norse stuff, I recommend Edda, by Sequentia, which is a reconstruction of how Icelandic poetry and music might have been performed c. 1200 AD.

For the Moon Road, just about all of the tracks onSomniloquy, by Lara Michell. Oh, and there's a link there to an mp3 of Phrygid from her first CD, which I think would be perfect for Windhowl.

Some more I thought of on the tube home:

Ysgard - BT's 'Firewater' off the album 'ESCM' is perfect for Ysgardian scenery, forests, tumbling waterfalls, etc. It's even got bird cries in it. It has a wonderful sense of wide open space and clear air.

Sigil - Hmm. This could fit any chaotic city full of intriguers, politicos, marketeers and people following their own agenda, or indeed any city that someone really hates and would quite like to see fall into the ocean (oh, Dave? ;) ), but Tool's 'Aenema' off the album of the same name. It's an ominous, rumbling, funny-time-signatured patchwork of a thing. The lyrics are about LA, but you can't hear Tool lyrics most of the time anyway.

Haelthan - if you can ignore the London-specific references, 'Turn The Page' by The Streets (on Original Pirate Material) is great. Lyrics about the sweep of history, bloody wars, memories fading to legend and being 'forty-fifth generation Roman', over an almost VNVish backing. It feels like being a young person in a very, very old city where a hell of a lot has happened. And it has lyrics like 'Stand by me, my apprentice. Be brave. Clench fists.'

This is fun. I'll probably be back.

Excellent; these're all great suggestions.

Look into Midnight Syndicate. They actually make RPG soundtracks. Most of their stuff so far has been for gothic/horror games, but they just recently did a CD for D&D.

Soundtracking

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