Rocking Trevor On Repeat ...
Rocking Trevor Morris on repeat, and more sweet tunes for your next sesh!
Happy Year of the Tiger! A few weeks back, I was playing Zoom euchre with some college friends and staring down another terrible digital hand full of 9s and 10s when one of my pals remembered he had a bone to pick with me. “Hey, my Spotify ‘Year in Review’ just landed. Who the hell is —”
“Trevor Morris!” I shouted in triumph.
I knew who his most played artist of the year must be — Emmy-winning TV and video game composer Trevor Morris — because I was personally responsible for making it happen. Turns out Trevor Morris was my most played artist of the year on Spotify, too. Same deal for my wife (pro tip: the key to a happy marriage is separate Spotify accounts).
Neither of them could pick Morris out of a police lineup or name one song he’s written. But they’d know his sound if they heard it, because I play Trevor Morris songs on endless repeat during our sessions, whether online or in-person.
Music is a huge part of playing Pathfinder with friends, and not just because Second Edition bards are awesome. There’s a tradition in my home game that we always play Led Zeppelin while players are arriving and setting up, because it never fails to get us hyped for adventure. The right music helps to immerse us in the fantasy, setting a mood that brings our tavern or temple or crypt to life.
When I’m GMing, I think hard about what I want my players to hear as we approach the eerie standing stones on the hill. And when the evil wraiths pop out and attack, I want a different track to ratchet up the tension.
But nailing the description of the standing stones and running the wraiths’ statblock in combat is already a lot of work for me, so the music needs to be easy to deploy and adjust. A lot of Pathfinder actual play podcasts use Syrinscape, which is an app featuring sound effects and ambient music for gaming that you may have heard about from their cute low-budget digital ads. But managing the soundsets has always seemed to me like a lot of work – the Glass Cannon Podcast crew assigns one of their players to run Syrinscape, and said player is always missing music cues and seeming distracted during his turn in combat.
(More lessons I’ve learned from Pathfinder actual play podcasts in an upcoming newsletter!)
So I scrape and organize music selections as part of my pre-session prep work. And the nice part about playing a home game, rather than recording your actual play podcast for publication, is you can use licensed music without paying royalties or receiving cease-and-desists from record labels!
Video game and TV scores are both great sources, and I’ll build thematic Spotify playlists to fit the tone of whatever setting I’m running in – when I ran a shipwreck adventure, I used lots of Michael Giacchino’s music from the TV series “LOST,” while a different desert city adventure called for atmospheric tracks from the “Prince of Persia” video game franchise. Our creepy Cthulhuian AP “Strange Aeons” was fueled by Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein’s “Stranger Things” soundtracks.
Which brings us to combat loops. If getting the music right during Exploration mode is a heavy lift for a GM, keeping things fresh in fast-paced Encounter mode is downright impossible. There’s just too much going on behind the screen, so you need the music to manage itself. I find the easiest way to do this is to play a single high-energy track on repeat, which raises another question: how do you find a battle track that you can play on repeat for 30 minutes or an hour without driving your players crazy?!
Oh look, Trevor Morris has entered the chat!
I’m not claiming to have performed an exhaustive search for the optimal combat music, but here are some tracks that continue to work for me:
“The Battle of Kijkduin / Besteaver,” by Trevor Morris from the film “Admiral,” is my most played battle loop – it’s high-energy but switches tones nicely to keep the vibe fresh, and at nearly 7 minutes long it doesn’t feel too repetitive on repeat
“Battle on the Beach,” by Trevor Morris from the TV series “The Vikings,” has great driving percussion and a smooth intro/outro that gives just enough of a breather between loops before it kicks back into gear
“Trespasser,” by Trevor Morris from the video game “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” is majestic and epic-sounding, very much suited to grand sword-and-shield battles and evocative of a mass combat scene
“The Chase,” by Martin Przybylowicz from the video game “Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales,” has a great pulsating rhythm and some Saharan-sounding strummed guitar that’s useful to evoke a desert or other exotic combat setting
“Run Away,” by Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein from the TV series “Stranger Things,” is a creepy electro track that’s weird and unsettling for all your Cthulhian panic needs, though I’ve always thought it could work well for sci-fi combat too
Of course, sometimes you just want to set a mood and let the music run, and that’s where longer playlists earn their keep: I’ve cobbled together playlists from TV series soundtracks that hit the spot for various settings, like “Stranger Things” for cosmic horror, “Castlevania” for haunted undead, “The Witcher” for high-fantasy monster hunting, “Shadowhunters” for dark creepy evil, and “Watchmen” for gritty urban intrigue by the current GOAT duo of TV and film composers, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
One of the things I love most about Spotify for in-session music is their beta feature called Group Session that launched in 2020: in the pandemic age of remote online play via Zoom and Roll20, it’s a seamless way to sync up music for the entire adventuring party without drowning out voices on Zoom or lagging your Roll20 virtual tabletop.
That’s how my friends all ended up in the Trevor Morris fan club without even knowing it: I can use my Spotify app to control the music coming through their headphones halfway across the country, so we all rack up dozens upon dozens of Trevor Morris plays while we’re rolling dice and battling demons on the Internet.
If you’re really obsessed with matching the right music to the in-game moment, you can curate a special playlist for a specific scene. That’s what I did a couple years ago for my “Hell’s Rebels” home game when (minor spoiler for the Pathfinder AP) the characters ended up attending a high-stakes dinner party hosted by a shadowy, sensuous politician known as the Queen of Delights.
What kind of real-world pop music, I thought to myself while planning the session, would this boss of the city’s pleasure-and-sin industry put on her magical turntable? The answer was an hour-long playlist of some of my favorite diabolical songs by Radiohead, Leonard Cohen, Florence + The Machine, and Wilco that seemed fitting for a fantasy world of devils and debauchery. To this day it remains one of my favorite dinnertime listens. Feel free to give it a spin tonight during your own supper, whether flesh golems are involved or not.
That’s it for this week. Keep those dice warm and don’t forget to press play. Adventure!