Enhancing the Mood: The Use of Music and Lighting in RPG’s

“Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder…”   – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It was either Barry White or Leo Tolstoy who said “Music is the shorthand of emotion.”  In the realm of tabletop role-playing games music, or any sound really, can be a huge aid in building the mood for a game or a huge distraction from that mood.

I’ve been a fan of horror gaming for almost as long as I’ve been a gamer.  Back in the 1980′s, my imagination was stoked by a little adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons written by Tracy & Jaura Hickman called Ravenloft.  I6.  This was the first time anyone attempted horror in a published AD&D adventure.  It was right in the middle of my gaming sweet spot.  The first time I ever DM’ed anyone through this adventure, I didn’t try to use any special music or lighting.  What happened that night, happened quite by accident.

When I first ran Ravenloft, it was the middle of summer and I was working as a lifeguard at my neighborhood pool.  One of the mixed blessings of that gig was that when it started to rain, I locked up and went home.  If things cleared up, I went back and re-opened.  It was great to be able to have an unexpected afternoon off from work, but frustrating to lose a few days worth of pay when it rained most of the week.  This particular afternoon, the rain gave me some unexpected time off, so my friends and I gathered, as we often did, in the travel trailer behind my parents’ house for a bit of gaming  and I decided it was time to open the pages of I6.

As I started into the adventure set-up, the rain really started coming down in buckets.  The sky grew dark and the wind picked up.  Electrical power in that trailer was provided by an extension cord running from an outdoor outlet under my parents’ house.  Yes, all of the power for the trailer, including the air conditioner, was carried from the main house by one heavy duty orange extension cord (I’m sure it wasn’t a fire hazard at all).  My dad & I had buried the line when we set the trailer up as my gaming den.  That afternoon, the power was flickering and we turned to battery-powered camping lanterns to supplement the scant flickering light of the fixture over the trailer’s kitchen table.

As the tension built, so did the storm.  Lightning crackled.  Thunder boom.  My players were almost wetting themselves.  It was one of the most amazing gaming experiences I’ve ever had, even to this day, more than 25 years later.  It was the perfect mood for that particular adventure.

Wait… I was saying something about music, wasn’t I?

Oh yeah, right.

I don’t use music or special lighting every time I run a game.  Actually, I’ve gone months at a time without using any music or lighting whatsoever.  I feel that using any sort of prop, whether it’s special lights, a soundtrack, a fog machine, or even rented tigers from the local zoo (hmmm… I’ve never tried that one), can become old hat for players.  Even the most exotic enhancement to the game can cease to be effective if it is used too often.

As a teenager, I used movie soundtracks to provide suitable mood music for gaming sessions.  A few years ago when I ran a horror game in D20 Modern, we used candles, but rarely music.  It was still pretty effective, except when people played with the candle wax or when things were set on fire.  When I had a player with a penchant for playing extremely distracting pop music during gaming sessions of a non-horror game, I used several fantasy soundtracks to provide more appropriate music for the game.  This is much easier now in the age of personal mp3 players, smartphones, and laptops at the gaming table.

Still, I never really tried to make an adventure into a “multisensory experience” until very recently.

I finally found my new Ravenloft.

SPOILER ALERT: The material below contains spoilers for “The Skinsaw Murders” and “The Hook Mountain Massacre” from Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords adventure path.

I’ve been GMing my group through Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords adventure path using the Pathfinder RPG.  When I started reading through the second volume of the adventure path, I immediately saw the potential for the use of some music and special lighting.  ”The Skinsaw Murders” is a deliciously dark haunted house adventure that, even without a vampire, captures the feel of the original Ravenloft very well.  When I started browsing the Paizo forums, I found some incredible battlemaps of the “haunted house” done by a user who calls himself Tintagel.  I sent the maps to my friendly neighborhood Office Depot to be printed on 11″x17″ paper and laminated.  I would’ve gone larger, but for two things: I was trying to do this on a limited budget, and I knew that somewhere in my cluttered garage was an 11″x17″ lightboard from my early days writing marching band drill (before we did that with a computer).

Selecting Music

“You come out at night
That’s when the energy comes
And the dark side’s light
And the vampires roam”
- Sarah MacLachlan, Building a Mystery

Once you get into the heart of the adventure, there isn’t a whole lot of combat.  What it does have is a building sense of dread.  My group played through the main section of the adventure in a single gaming session.  This helped greatly in maintaining that building dread.  It also helped in that I didn’t have to choreograph much of the music to specific sections of the adventure and was able to keep my main playlist, which I created in iTunes, on shuffle for most of the night.  There were two encounters which I used specific music for, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Since the feeling of the adventure is of darkness, decay, dread, and doom (this adventure was brought to you by the letter “D”), I started looking for creepy music that really accented that feeling.  Of course, I started my search with movies and video games I knew and worked from there.  My final playlist consisted of 47 tracks from the following excellent sources (in alphabetical order for convenience):

• Bioshock (Orchestral Score), Garry Schyman – 5 tracks
• Constantine (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Brian Tyler & Klaus Badelt – 12 tracks
• Dark Water (Original Score), Angelo Badalamenti – 11 tracks
• Dolores Claiborne (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Danny Elfman – 7 tracks
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), Jon Brion – 3 tracks
• Inception (Music from the Motion Picture), Hans Zimmer – 5 tracks
• Oblivion (Original Soundtrack), Jeremy & Julian Soule – 4 tracks

Yes, this freaked them right the fuck out.

One thing I usually try to avoid is music with lyrics.  Lyrics can break the mood of a game quicker than a dogfight next to the gaming table (true story).

There are some exceptions to this.  For a costumed vigilante game I ran a few years ago, music with lyrics worked quite well.  One of the players called his hero “The Man In Black” and used a Johnny Cash soundtrack for his character.

Also, not every adventure or game is going to have the creepy horror vibe that resonates through “The Skinsaw Murders.”  For fantasy, when I use music, I usually use a playlist consisting of the soundtracks from: The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth I & II (video games), Robin Hood (movie), Conan the Barbarian (movie), Oblivion and Morrowind (video games).  I’ve also used the Braveheart soundtracks and other Celtic music for a psuedo-Celtic themed game I ran years ago.

“I bet you can squeal like a pig.” – Deliverance

Like I said earlier, there are exceptions to the “no lyrics” rule.  Also, there are other types of horror than the “creepy gothic haunted houses with slowly building dread.”  The third volume of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path is an example of a type of horror that’s pretty rare in tabletop rpg’s.  It was much more difficult to build a playlist for the visceral horror of “The Hook Mountain Massacre” because I didn’t want to use heavy metal (which most visceral horror soundtracks use – see: Zombie, Rob).  Most people suggested banjo music for this adventure, and I did end up using some, including the incredibly appropriate “Dueling Banjos” from one of the adventure’s primary inspirations, Deliverance.  Still, most banjo music didn’t convey the sense of horror I wanted to establish.

Instead, I turned to another genre typically found in parts of the rural south: Delta Blues.  My first inspiration to use the blues in a horror themed adventure was the movie Black Snake Moan.  Scott Bomar’s opening theme to this movie conveys the perfect mood.  I plan to queue it up for right when the PC’s encounter Rukus Graul.  I’m following it up with the aformentioned “Dueling Banjos” as the impact of what they’ve discovered settles in for the players.  The next thing I discovered that really helped me set up this playlist was Alan Lomax‘s Southern Journeys recordings.  There are some great dark blues numbers on these recordings.  I also added a couple of tracks from the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack and a creepy sounding version of “I’m My Own Grandpa” by Stringer Folk.  I conclude the whole thing after 29 tracks with a dark sounding minor key version of “Dueling Banjos” by Mike “Chickenhawk” Toppins.  If you’re interested in seeing the tracks I used and you have iTunes, go to the Ping tab and type in “Hook Mountain” when you search for a playlist.  I’m not using shuffle for this one, as I’ve tried to organize the tracks into an order that makes sense.  We’ll see how it flows when I run the adventure over the next few weeks.

Lighting

We play at my kitchen table, usually well-lighted by the fixture right above the table.  I don’t have any dimmers installed and don’t have the electrical expertise to try that.  I’m also working on a budget here.  I took a trip to my local home improvement warehouse and purchase 5 colored lightbulbs that fit the standard sockets of the light fixture above the dining room table.  I used primarily reds & purples for the haunted house portion of “The Skinsaw Murders” with a blue and a green thrown in for balance.  The light was adequate, but I warned my players to bring flashlights, which they used occasionally.  In the center of my large table-sized battlemat, I placed the lightboard (my budget is too small for a suspended projector) with a portable can light in either end of it.  I put a “candle flicker” bulb in each of the two portable can lights.  I went with these instead of real candles because I didn’t want to set my house (or dogs) on fire.  The 7 lightbulbs (5 color and 2 candle flicker) cost about $3 each and the portable can lights were $8 each.  Not too rough on the wallet.

I usually don’t use special lighting for gaming.  I will probably go back to traditional lighting (maybe even brighter lighting) for the visceral horror of “The Hook Mountain Massacre” to convey a different atmosphere than the gloom of the haunted house.  Sometimes, bright lighting can be scary in its own right.

Your turn.

Does anybody use any special music, props, or lighting to enhance the mood in tabletop rpg’s?  Please share with us in the comments section.