Bardic Inspiration: The music that inspires me

-

 


Role playing games and music have been entwined for a long time, in many different ways. Just off the top of my head, there is a Fate world about being a DJ, Void 1680 AM and Ribbon Drive both have you building playlists as part of the play experience, and a plethora of games have the aesthetics and vibes of specific music genres and core inspirational texts, perhaps most famously MÖRK BORG and Ultraviolet Grasslands, though I am sure you could find many more.

The influence of music on play can take many forms, some people listen to music while writing, others play background music to set the scene during play. His Majesty the Worm suggests associating each underworld level with a specific song, as well as using tracks for beginning and ending sessions, for challenges, as well as recurring NPCs. Music can be a terrific tool to set the mood.

In my free-time listening, I experience a bunch of different music, and one of my great regrets is not knowing any music theory. I therefore can't really talk about the music I like with any sort of authority. What I can however, is present a small subset of it, that when I listen to it, really makes me want to write (or play) an RPG inspired by it. Here is a small selection of tracks that make me want to write:

Her Shadow - Poisoned Moon



Soulmuppet have their Sad Vampire Game, this song makes me want to write a Sad Werewolf game. Or perhaps something about witches and curses and the moon. It's good and gets those juices flowing.

Elegi - Den Store Hvite Stillhet



This one is maybe slightly cheating, because it is not only the music that inspires me, but also the excerpts of Fridtjof Nansen's speech in memory of fellow polar explorer Roald Amundsen. It truly evokes the greatness, as well as the bleakness, of the great white polar regions, and the bravery it takes to explore them. I am working on a hack of Snow's Songbirds 3e, and this track, as well as the rest of Elegi's discography, serves as a primary inspiration.

Hexvessel - Son of the Sky

 


I really want to make an occult folk-horror game, and the music of Hexvessel plays a huge role in this. The specific song chosen here is a bit arbitrary: really, any song in their discography activates my Old Gods of England neurons.

Honorable mention: Spiral Skies - Dark Side of the Cross



Slightly different from the rest of the post, this song (and the music of Spiral Skies more generally) does not so much get my writing juices flowing as it makes me just really want to play Ultraviolet Grasslands. Please. Give me the time for more gaming in my life!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality

-
Image
  One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha ), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real consequence. I do not entirely disagree with this, but I also do not entirely agree. My opinion aligns more with Pandatheist's follow-up post , arguing that "consequential" would be a better term. Perhaps my brain is poisoned with modern "trad" ideology, but when playing longer campaigns rather than one-shots, I find that the characters tend to evolve beyond vehicle's for the players' problem solving, developing interesting quirks and personalities that it would be a shame to lose because of an unlucky dice-roll (because that is one OSR tenet I do still believe in - the sanctity of the dice result). A dramatic death because of calculated risk gone wrong, or a heroic last stand against an ogre whil...
Read more

A method for condensed worldbuilding

-
Image
  An important part of playing role-playing games is a shared understanding of the fictional world. A common assumption is that the game master knows everything there is to know about the world, and the players know some subset of this. Of course, what the players know, and what their characters know might not always fully overlap, which can cause issues in the game. What happens when my diplomat character wants to talk about the different empires he has visited in his travels, but I, the player have forgotten, or worse, haven't been told about them? A common way of countering this problem is shared worldbuilding on the fly, having the GM share their power of "just making something up" with the players. However, this may not always be a satisfactory solution. Sometimes it is just nice to have a shared foundation to build on from the start, not having to nail it together while we are actually in the middle of some other encounter. Having a pre-existing idea of the world ca...
Read more

Rules are a Safety Tool

-
Image
  I have recently been reading Fabula Ultima (more thoughts on that in a future post), and one thing that struck me is how often the rules text emphasises to not deviate from the rules-as-written unless everybody consents. This feels like a departure from the tabletop culture of allowing the GM to override the rules whenever it suits the game, or come up with their own house rules and expect the table to accept them. However, after further deliberation, it appears to me that this can be because the rules are a safety tool. Many people with more experience and knowledge and me have written about safety tools, so I will not go into deep detail here (see e.g. the TTRPG Safety Toolkit ), but one thing that seems generally true is that they only really work when everybody engages with them in good faith. They will not stop a problem player, who can easily ignore them, abuse them, or just generally cause an uncomfortable situation. What they are good for, is preventing those who want to...
Read more