February is going to be pretty jam-packed! I've got some very exciting collaborations I don't want to spoil just yet, but keep your eyes peeled. Of course, today is the 1st so let's do some track requests. Same rules as always:
It can be so satisfying to roleplay some genuinely emotional moments in a campaign. In truth, most of the time when I'm DMing, things get quite goofy, but that just makes the occasional gut punch so much better. Confronting someone from your past (i.e. one of the 3 named NPCs in a player's backstory) can be cathartic and intense, and music can really help to sell those feelings in an otherwise silly campaign.
This solo piano rendition of "Defending Varsanspear" basically serves...
2021-01-30 18:14:47 +0000 UTC View Post
NOTE: Monday is the first of February, so please get those track requests in! Dump them in the comments here or throw them in the Discord. Limit 2 per patron. Thanks!
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You know, it's been a while since I've done a full-fledged one-on-one collab with my great friends Cze and Peku. I haven't mentioned it in a while, but it was Cze who first encourag...
2021-01-30 18:03:59 +0000 UTC View Post"Barleywine" is going to see a lot of playtime in your campaign I suspect. Everyone ends up in fantasy villages doing standard fantasy roleplaying eventually, so it seems like a pretty universally useful tune to have in your library.
Many adventures will eventually have you making your way to the upper echelons of society as well. While early quests may be given at a tavern, later tasks may be provided by the hand of the king or perhaps a wealthy benefactor. For those mor...
2021-01-25 14:42:13 +0000 UTC View PostWhen your party enters a tavern (or inn / market / Airbnb / etc), you'll often want to immediately spell out the vibe: jovial melting pot! dour dive bar! seedy meeting place! But other times, you might not want to immediately reveal all your cards. A lot of tavern scenes in RPGs need to feel neutral. Yes, the players will likely realize that they are about to be given a quest, but you shouldn't always tip your hand so quickly as to whether these patrons are secret succubi or benevole...
2021-01-25 14:35:52 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a few months, but I've finally got a new playlist for y'all: DnD Campfire. This playlist is ideal for those moments at the very beginning and very end of the adventuring day. Not quite calm: these are often stressful moments, contemplating the challenges of the day ahead. There's a good mix of songs of rest, songs of worry, and the occasional song of merriment. ...
2021-01-20 12:57:03 +0000 UTC View PostThis ambient variant of "Ullha Dore'i" is far less menacing than the original. You still have a lot of the same character: atmospheric drones and strings and twinkles, but without most of the melismatic melody, you lose a lot of that seductive character. This is good if you're still in the introductory / exploratory phases of an enchanted forest, a bioluminescent cave, or some magical crystal outcropping.
In fact, I think the best use of this track would be for narratively important (th...
2021-01-18 13:16:35 +0000 UTC View PostNOTE: If you want a perfectly twilit Feywild map to accompany this track, consider checking Ori the Cartographer's latest release!
I'm such a big fan of how the Feywild is characterized in Dungeons and Dragons. Yes it's a beautiful forested landed of twinkling twilight. Yes it's filled with adorable animated plant spirits and pixies and sprites. And yes just about everythin...
2021-01-18 13:11:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Big news y'all! My latest collection of music just launched on Bandcamp and streaming services. Don't worry, there's nothing new here! My lovely patrons will always be the first to get access to my RPG music. That said, I know many of you prefer to listen on Spotify as opposed to wrangling loose mp3s,...
2021-01-15 21:35:05 +0000 UTC View PostI truly hope you enjoyed the crunchy, eldritch boss music I wrote for "Charon." It's so fun to write music that is both eerie but also super aggressive. That said, I find that the build-up to an encounter like this is often just as satisfying as the fight itself. When your players are exploring wicked cathedrals, umbral fortresses, or just... y'know, Tartarus, this music will set the scene.
I tried to keep things very spooky with plenty of reverb to give the whole "hallucinatory voices"...
2021-01-15 04:24:18 +0000 UTC View Post
If you're anything like me, you've played the absolute hell out of the smash-hit roguelike Hades, a sort of "coming of age" story about the Greek Gods and their complicated family lives. In this (in my opinion perfect) video game, Charon is depicted as he typically is: a silent, neutral, ferryman. Brother to the personifications of sleep and death, he single-mindedly shepherded expired souls to the afterlife (and sells snacks? I don't think that's canonical in Greek mytholog...
2021-01-15 04:19:47 +0000 UTC View PostI love some intense dungeon delving, but I have to admit that a lot of the non-combat moments that occur for the parties I DM are quite a bit quieter. Strange tombs and forgotten ruins might be filled with danger, but until a trap is sprung or an enemy alerted, the moment-to-moment gameplay is more about exploration, puzzle solving, and narrative.
For that, you'll need something relatively sparse. This reworked version of "Scorchcleft" is perfect for those intermediary moments,...
2021-01-05 16:01:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Greetings, folks! Today I bring you a collaboration with Matt AKA The Goblin Explorer. Matt has been releasing an infinitely iterating dungeon via tiered maps, and I was happy to help with level 6, a lava-filled passageway rife with opportunity to shove some twisted duergar into a pit of molten rock.
My track to accompany this map is titlted "Scorchcleft," and it is without a doubt the most volcanic track ...
2021-01-05 16:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostWhelp, we made it! My calendar says 2021, so I guess here we are. Time to vote for your January track requests. Same rules as always:
A few weeks ago, I asked you all whether a giant sortable catalog of all of my tunes would be useful. The answer was a resounding yes (which is pretty much always the case when I ask y'all if you want more stuff). I decided in that moment to try to finish the spreadsheet before 2021, and as of posting, it's around 6:30 where I live in New Hampshire. I did it!
So here it is! Voila! 2020-12-31 22:44:55 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey all! Hope you all had a lovely holiday. I'm enjoying a couple days off at the moment, but just wanted to send out some quick updates on my end! First and foremost, January is rapidly approaching, so be sure to get those track requests in. Limit 2 per patron, and please do post them in a way that makes it easy for me to share (e.g. preferably fewer than 10 words, and a prompt that folks will understand). Drop them here, in the Discord, send me an email, whatever. I don't c...
2020-12-30 16:45:24 +0000 UTC View PostHey y'all, hope you enjoyed another big free collab! It was really cool to get a chance to work with all those other tabletop composers. Such a cool group of musicians! I do highly recommend checking out all of their work.
My track "The Fathomless" is something that I've wanted to write for a while. I currently have an aquatic campaign with all sorts of bizarre and spooky deep sea creatures and adventures, so having evocative "dungeon-esque" music with that vibe is ideal. If you need so...
2020-12-21 15:01:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Note: You can download everything via the zip file at the bottom of this post
Something Melodious is Bubbling Up!
Hey everyone!
In honor of the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, I teamed up with a crew of stellar composers to bring you this album inspired by some of the new subclasses for the world's greatest role-playing game! In this collection of eight brand new tunes, you’ll get an epic call to adventure, some mysterious vibes from ...
2020-12-21 15:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostHappy holidays y'all! I'm so proud of that doozy of an adventure I just released in the main feed. This was the culmination of months of work from soooo many awesome creators. Please do check out all of the goodies in there: trains, Christmas monsters, and jams aplenty. There's a looping version of my cozy holiday tune attached below.
Additionally, I've got another return to an old favorite for...
2020-12-18 18:20:31 +0000 UTC View Post
DOWNLOAD HERE or you can just grab my track attached at the bottom of this post!
Every year, Klaus the Kindhearted travels across the planes visiting all the good little boys and girls and delivering to them magical treats and gifts. He does this on his magical train, The Astral Express. This year, ...
2020-12-18 18:10:59 +0000 UTC View PostOne of my main bucketlist goals is to write an HBO prestige television theme song. Let me do the next Game of Thrones, Westworld, True Detective, whatever. I can't describe what exactly it is, but there's an appropriate catchiness and grit to those sorts of bangers that are still so perfectly evocative of the shows they set up.
This week's variant is that but for Lawless Wooster. I added some crunchy bass, some vibing drums, and of course some saloon piano. What is this useful ...
2020-12-10 15:24:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello folks! Today I bring to you another addition to Venatus Maps's setting of the Great Expanse: the town of Wooster. I love this map, because it's quite unlike many of the topdown battlemaps you're used to. When I DM cities, I never use a true "5-ft square" battlemap, and prefer to just give a sense of place and show my players where things are, what they look like, and their general proportions. ...
2020-12-10 15:14:48 +0000 UTC View PostEvery once in a while, the "figure out what the heck is going on" portion of a mystery might have a bit of additional pressure added. Maybe some nefarious culprits are pursuing you, or perhaps there's some time pressure on you to solve one murder before another occurs. Or perhaps this "stealth" mission just became an "avoid line-of-sight as long as possible" mission.
This intense variant of "Something Amiss" is perfect for those slightly heightened encounters. This is certainly not boss...
2020-12-08 01:26:08 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's track request poll winner was "Something Quiet but Unsettling for Exploring Places That Don’t Feel Right." As a DM, I think it's totally okay to "give away the game" so to speak when the party is checking out a locale where things aren't quite as they seem: a haunted mansion, a corrupted forest, a secret lair of any sort. Sometimes, your players just know this isn't a simple "chill with some rich people in a big house" sort of adventure. They're cannibals, or vampires,...
2020-12-08 01:21:36 +0000 UTC View PostHell year is almost over! Time to select the final track request of 2020! As always:
Also, just a quick programming note for this month: you will be getting as many tracks as any other month, but they're going to be spaced out a bit funny. I ended up committing to a lot of coll...
2020-12-01 13:58:31 +0000 UTC View PostHey hey patrons! December is almost upon us, so that means I need track requests! Feel free to drop them in the comments, post them in the discord, or just send a dang postcard to my house. Whatever is easiest! Same rules as always: limit 2 per person, and please try to write it in such a way that it's easy to actually put in a poll.
Next up, I've got a poll! I'm debating creating a big reference document for all of my tracks. It would be...
2020-11-29 17:57:12 +0000 UTC View PostBig choirs and organs do the trick for impactful church scenes, but might not see a lot of use outside that. If you need some emotional music for non-church scenes, try putting on "Mother of All (Orchestra)." It's still got that really lush expansiveness, but without the obviously Western religion connotations. Something about the ethereal harps and celesta also give off a bit off a "mystic forest" vibe, so if you need yet another track to fill that niche, I've got you covered! ...
2020-11-27 15:07:21 +0000 UTC View PostChurches always end up as important plot point in my campaigns. Part of that is because in many D&D settings, religion is canonically real, so a place of worship is the spot you're likely going to find some pretty important dudes. A cathedral can be an epic lair for a combat encounter, a sacred sanctuary where friends are resurrected, or the fateful setting for a crisis of faith. In short: lots of really big picture stuff!
When you have an emotional or plot-driving moment i...
2020-11-27 15:00:16 +0000 UTC View PostI know I'm a bit of a broken record right now, but I really enjoy making these ultra sparse ambient versions of previous tracks. Uncovering the bedrock sound layer at the heart of many of my old tunes is satisfying, and basking in the luxurious soundscapes is completely relaxing!
This week I've got a spaced out rearrangement of "A Fey Presence." No plucky strings, no hyper-present guitar, no aggressive swells. Just slow moving synths and swirling strings. Put this on for peacef...
2020-11-22 18:16:03 +0000 UTC View PostI love that "oh shit" moment. As a GM, it's so satisfying to witness your party come to the realization that yes it was not smart to pull that lever. Something very bad is about to happen and you're in panic mode. HOWEVER: your sword is not drawn and no one is presently trying to kill you. You simply know that massive consequences are in your immediate future.
This month's winner of the Track Request Poll was "You Are In Terrible Danger, But Not Quite Combat Yet." That's ...
2020-11-22 18:09:48 +0000 UTC View Post