RPG Music

I'll direct the attention of my maybe two or three readers to Travis Savoie, a composer on bandcamp who's made his mark by creating RPG music, specifically albums that serve as unofficial soundtracks to many of the major 5e campaigns. In case it's not immediately obvious, his soundtracks map to the campaigns as follows:

Into the Mists - Curse of Strahd

Winter's Wrath - Rime of the Frostmaiden

Death Curse - Tomb of Annihilation

Warmonger - Descent Into Avernus

Adventure Calls - Waterdeep: Dragon Heist

Vile Depths - Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage

Heart's Desire - Wild Beyond the Witchlight

Beyond the Mists - more Curse of Strahd music

Chronicles of Strixhaven - obvious, innit?

Echoes of the Underworld - Out of the Abyss

Sadly lacking still is Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Princes of the Apocalypse. I don't really care about the soundtracks as pertaining to the campaigns per se, because I'm unlikely to ever run a 5e campaign, but I like that they give the musician a theme to explore, with even some obvious chapters and vignettes to illustrate musically. I quite like Travis' work, and heartily recommend it to people who may otherwise use movie or video game soundtracks. Get something that's a little more esoteric, but also specifically designed to reflect a specific campaign.

You may also notice five additional albums, labeled RPG Toolkits 1-5. These are also definitely worth getting, but they're a bit different. The main soundtracks come in tracks that are 3-4 minutes long, on average, with extended versions that loop them two or three times; just enough to not feel repetitive, meant to be used more as background elements while you're running the game, I'd think.

The RPG Toolkits are also made up long 10-11 minute loops of tracks, meant to be played in the background at the table. 20-25 in each album. However, the stems that loop are only a minute to a minute and a half long, so most of them start to feel repetitive, even as simple background music. I'd already opened the mp3s I downloaded in Audacity, because the volume is also low, and I wanted to normalize to my other tracks. I decided to create alternate "short" folders with versions of the tracks that won't get tiring if I'm playing them while reading, or writing, or running a game, or just in the background on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

I cut each of the tracks off at about three and a half minutes, and then selected the portion from three to three and half and applied the fade out effect to it. Each track therefore gets two full loops of the stem before starting to fade; some of them get almost three. It's maybe a little bit of a cruder way to go than finding the specific point where the third loop starts and then fading it for twenty to thirty seconds from there, but that's OK. They're just repeated stems. And I still have the original longer tracks in another folder. And I can always download or stream them from Bandcamp anyway, since I bought them.

I'm actually kind of excited to see what I can do with these shorter tracks. Travis also generously allows people to use his tracks for their games, for their youtube channels, podcasts, actual plays, etc. as long as he's credited, so as I make more Youtube videos about gaming, I'll probably use a lot more of these loops. It's better than the same dozen or so Kevin MacLeod tracks getting used over and over again by everyone, if nothing else.

Also, because I think it's important to add an image to most posts for visual interest, but I don't want to use any of his album covers, here's the old Larry Elmore Companion set artwork, with a faint watermark because I got it on his site. This can be bought from his site, too. I actually would really like to buy the Basic, Expert, Companion and Masters, and frame them for a room that I game in. Maybe if I can fit six, I'd also get that ice boat Dragonlance art, since it's visually similar and looks like it'd fit. Not sure about the final one; either an old Endless Quest title with a bone dragon, or maybe for some variety, the Star Frontiers cover art.

UPDATE: I wonder how it would have worked out if I'd cut the stems at 4:00 minutes, faded out the last thirty seconds, but faded in the first thirty seconds? Whatever. It's pretty seamless the way I have it; I've had them playing in the background yesterday while working. Even with all of the tracks cut to ~3:30 give or take a couple of seconds, I find that it's still an almost seven hour playlist to pile them all in Winamp. (Yes, I still use Winamp, and prefer it to any alternative. And yes, I still use mp3s for all of my musical needs, other than occasionally playing directly off of YouTube or Spotify here and there. After all, I have an awful lot of unusual or even modified tracks.)