Friday, November 30, 2018

Pandorum OST for Background Music

Watch Pandorum(It's not as bad as you think)
Hello my reader, I'd like to scribble to you a bit of my method on creating background music for the games that I run. As a coastal elite, I only appreciate the finest things in life. That's why I understand that the original soundtrack for the film Pandorum (don't read the plot, see the movie!) is to be adored. In my view, the film has a compelling story and is generally underrated. I won't contest that it has a number of problems. Whatever someone may think of the film, the excellence of its OST is incontrovertible. Therefore, behold both the tracks of the soundtrack, how I handle background music for RPGs as well as how I categorize the tracks of this OST.
Well, my last post, Pavlov's Players, detailed how I use and categorized background music. This post is maybe the method applied. I go through each of the tracks and show how they are sorted into the various playlists which I mentioned in my earlier post. However, for ease I'll list the categories below.
Categories: Combat, Grinding [creepy], Somber [creepy], Theme, Travel.
  1. All That is Left of Us - GrindCreepy
  2. Pandorum -Grinding Creepy
  3. Anti-Riot -GrindCreep but almost Somber
  4. Shape -Theme (but could certainly be creepy)
  5. Hunting Party -Combat
  6. Kulzer Complex -Combat?Creepy? (I put it in combat since i had fewer combat tracks)
  7. Tanis Probe Broadcast -Somber
  8. Scars -Grinding Creepy
  9. Fucking Solidarity -combat
  10. Gallo's Birth -SomberCreepy
  11. Biolab Attack -Combat, deliciously creepy combat. It's got a good mix of Grinding, Somber, and someone's going to die.
  12. Kanyrna -combat
  13. The Stars All Look Alike -Somber
  14. Boom -Somber or Grinding
  15. "Reactor" (4:08) - Grinding
  16. "Skin on Skin" (3:21) - Grinding
  17. "Fight Fight Fight" (2:56) -Combat (shocker, right? Actually, it can also double as a Grinding creepy)
  18. "Bower's Trip" (7:51) - Grinding 
  19. "Discovery / End Credits" (7:55) - Grinding.
The most interesting thing, of course, is what I use the themes for. That's what I named the initial blog post about background music after, after all -- Pavlov's Players. The track that I listened to here which I found to be creepy and self-contained enough for something I had in mind was "Shape." Now "Shape" is the theme for the zombie-mutants of my post-apocalyptic "Irradiated, Infected, or Afraid" campaign. Any time the PCs encounter a zombie, I'll begin playing Shape and describe the zombie's tough pale-gray skin, it's sharp fang-teeth, it's elongated fingers with blunt dogs' claws, it's lack of an iris in its watery eyes, and its expression of confused rage and hunger. The idea is, the music will help cement this description in the players' minds so that when I next play it, they'll be able to imagine what they'd imagined before when I first gave the description.
For fun, have this stupid and terrible quasi-poem based off the track titles:
So We're all that's left because some XOs got Pandorum. Guess we should spray some anti-riot on this ship (is that mace?) so that good things can take shape. Nevermind, all we got was a hunting party raiding our notorious Kulzer Complex. At least, that's what the Tanis Probe Broadcast said, when it was describing the scars they left in fucking solidarity. Suppose it's the Gallow's Rebirth after the Biolab Attack in Kanyrna. I hate it when all the stars look alike but I'm fine while things go boom. After a swim in the reactor we can lay skin on skin (cuz it fell off heheh) having fought fought fought Bower's bad trip. Look what we discovered.

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