Pavlov's Players: Background Music

I first started using background music at some point in my first campaign. The first idea I had of it was literally a joke. I was inspired to play during a fight "Amok Time," the famous Star Trek The Original Series fighting music. It's silly 1960s music was a perfect gag to bring some laughs to the table (which was the point of playing to begin with). I guess everyone might know it as the music of when Kirk fought the Gorn, but I recall it as when Kirk fights horny Spock. Oddly enough, I don't remember people being as amused by it as I was when I played it. After that I began looking at music that I might play while running the game and began exploring the video game soundtracks of Fable, Diablo, EverQuest, etc. The next game that I started running was over Roll20, and I began making extensive use out of the Jukebox that's available there. Gaming without music now just seems a little too quiet. So, here's my way of handling background music for the games that I run.

Background Music by Themed Playlists

Naturally, a GM might establish a nice playlist of music found in a video game or a movie or wherever one might find nice ambient music for a theme. There are plenty of pieces of music which match one or more themes that are present in an RPG. In that past I have categorized the themes/playlists as: Wilderness, Combat, Creepy, Dungeon, and Town. Generally they corresponded to place and situation. That style originated from when I was GMing D&D (Pathfinder). Those playlists were all on shuffle, and whenever the PCs moved into a different area or a different situation, I'd switch between playlists. The playlists weren't terribly nuanced and I had them a bit too general -- occasionally the desert would creep into the forest. 

Recently I've departed from place, and stick entirely to situation (although maybe that hasn't really changed much). The playlists I have now are: Combat, Somber-Creepy, Grinding-Creepy, Hard-Boiled [Apocalypse], Themes, and Travel. Combat hardly needs much explanation. It's fast-paced, sometimes abrasive, usually pretty rhythmic, and attempts to be intense, as dramatic as possible, and fear-evoking. The point is to energize with productive stress. An example of a track which has been on my Combat playlist for sometime now is "On the Champs-Désolés" or "Commanding the Fury," both from The Witcher 3.

I am a fan of creepy music (who isn't?). There are shades of creepy, or at least attitudes of creepy. There's the somber, yet still helter-skelter creepy. That one lets your skin crawl, but from a slow-creeping sense of anticipation and the hope that perhaps the consequences and risks will be slimmer. Good examples of this are Atlantean Twilight (especially good if played alongside Dark Future by Tabletop Audio), Classic Horror, or Colorless Aura by Kevin MacLeod. Another creepy, which I call Grinding, dashes away that hope, setting on full-display that naught is right with the world. It's much more abrasive that a somber creepy. A Grinding creepiness abandons the mournful tones that a somber creepiness generally carries, and dives headlong into latent threat. Nearly all of the soundtrack for Pandorum belongs to this category.

Hard-Boiled Apocalypse (I'm running GURPS After the End) came out mostly as a result of my listening to Incompetech and discovering much of his jazz and blues. It reminded me a little of the countless hours I spent listening to the music of Fallout 3, and I decided that I should compile it. I suppose I'd play it in schmoozing moments and generally when the PCs are ostensibly out of danger. So the Hard-Boiled Apocalypse playlist effectively performs the function of Town, calming the players and luring them into a sense of normalcy or security.

Pavlov, presumably listening to chimes

The Themes playlist is less of a playlist and more of a list of pieces of music. I won't play it on shuffle. Instead, in specific circumstances, such as facing certain NPCs or enemies or evading a specific kind of danger (radiation, landslides, flesh-eating locusts, whatever), I'll play a specific track available in this playlist. Some of them might not be just for a single NPC: "Amazing Grace (instrumental)" might be reserved for the entrance to a settlement that the PCs have managed to save from a terrible corruption and "Corncob" might be reserved for when the PCs enter Deliverance. The themes just allow me to attempt to establish some kind of evocative response for these NPCs and places, helping to make them memorable by building associations. Just think back to the song that was ruined by some moment that's forever associated with it. Sorry I reminded you, but it's basically like that except hopefully better. When the PCs think about the zombies, they'll remember the horrifying and nauseating music that comes along with them. In a way, I'm talking about making Pavlov's Players...
Travel is essentially like Wilderness. Quiet music that isn't particularly creepy, yet creepy enough to warrant being present in the post-apocalypse. It probably has some natural elements, involved, such as several minutes of spoopy rain, which is appropriate since the game is set in New England. That said, I've also placed a few songs in which are not nearly as terrible (in terms of terror) as the rest.
That's my categories for background music at the moment. They serve as any background music, setting tone for the action presented at the table. In the future, I may go more in depth in background music, but I sort of doubt it. The concept is pretty obvious, and having something to listen to at the table can range from something pleasant to hear as we play or a powerful tool in the hands of the GM. I can remember several games which had a soundtrack of their own, which were in fact soundtracks from a couple different sources.
I have a coming post which is basically my categorization of the tracks from the Pandorum OST. It's good, very spooky and alarming. Perfect material to help produce unnerving scenes. I imagine that it won't be my last post of that nature.