Early character signs

Well, since we didn't end up playing, a few of the guys are starting to rethink their character options. They've got two weeks to figure it all out, after all. Although this is pretty preliminary, it looks like I'm getting a mix of swashbucklers and outdoorsmen. The reports I have so far of intended characters include a jann fighter/rogue, another roguish type of some kind, a human ranger, a hellspawn scout, and a vucari barbarian. Nobody has access to magic--yet--but I anticipate that they will have the opportunity to learn some incantations and possibly some other, nastier things in the near future (certainly at the end of the first "module" when, assuming that they're successful, they'll end up with a copy of The Book of the Black Prince.)

One thing that I'm considering, since I now have the time to do so, is coming up with a soundtrack specifically for this campaign. I've spent the better part of the last few years collecting movie score soundtracks, in part because I think that they're great to play in the background while gaming (but also while reading, while writing, and while doing all kinds of other things, and I even move movie scores out of the background and listen to them for their own sake as good music.) I don't worry too much about matching particular tracks to particular sequences in the game; rather, I prefer to simply look for songs that have the appropriate mood and feel for the campaign as a whole.

With that, I'm trying to decide exactly which soundtracks best approximate the DARK•HERITAGE tone, and heavily use those, editing out a few tracks that don't really fit, perhaps, and filling in with a bunch of other songs from other soundtracks that might possibly add to the mix, even if the rest of the soundtrack they come from isn't really what I'm looking for. That said, I think a dark, almost horror-like feel is definately where I want to start. I described the campaign to my players as kind of "fantasy X-files", and while that's kinda sorta true, that's an oversimplification too. Right now, and actually for a quite a while, my favorite pseudo-horror soundtracks include Danny Elfman's The Wolfman soundtrack, and the collaborative soundtracks by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard for the two most recent Batman movies. Mixing in a fair number of tracks--if not most of the entire CDs--from the three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a few of the Harry Potter soundtrack tracks, some songs from The Mummy and maybe even Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sherlock Holmes and Prince of Persia and/or the new Clash of the Titans gives me just a bit of an exotic, Arabian Nights-esque action adventure vibe to mix in with the horror and dark fantasy--about perfect, right? We'll see.

We'll see how much room I have, actually--ideally, I'd create a "mix" CD (of mp3 files, so I can get a lot of tracks on it) that I can use as my portable soundtrack for the campaign. That'll be about 9-10 CDs worth of music. So, for all of the soundtracks, I'll have to make sure that I edit it to just the exact tracks I want; I won't have room to pad it out with too much repetitition, or tracks that bring in a different mood.