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You're forgetting one key soundtrack: SPYBREAK by THE PROPELLORHEADS. (For those of you who don't know The Matrix inside out, that's the lobby scene music.). Or for that matter, some of the new soundtracks from Matrix Reloaded work well for action sequences. I particularly like BURLY BRAWL (from the Agent Smith fight) and CHATEAU (The massive exotic weapon fight).

Theme music for any situation is easily found from any of the Final Fantasy games, and Chrono Trigger, as well.

good list. I'd like to offer a few myself:

Champions: the Cowboy BeBop soundtrack. What fun!
Deadlands: Anything Ragtime. Think about Scott joplin and tinny saloon pianos. Maple Leaf Rag, (or anything that ends with "Rag")
LoFR: Don't forget the tracks from The Last Emperor and Empire of the Sun
7th Sea: how about Bach, Handel, and the other baroque folks? Also, check out a neat group called the Baltimore Consort. They have a few albums of Late Renaissance or early baroque music out there, notably The Art of the Bawdy Song and On the Banks of the Halicon.

That's all I got for just now. Great concept for an Article, KP.

Cheers,

JKB

I find FF music particularly appropriate for my D&D campaign.

Great ideas - all. I've always found that a good soundtrack can enhance the emotional vibe or sense of pace in a game. In movies, it provides the emotional voice of the film usually.

We use instrumental soundtracks - often movie or videogame soundtracks in our games. Another GM tried to give us clues about the game by picking songs with certain lyrics. For example, we had to figure out that someone was a vampire, so he played Bela Lugosi's Dead. This was awful - basically metagaming because he couldn't figure out a way to tell us within the context of the game. Bad way to go.

But definately - to add emotional flavor, without adding information - this is what you want.

Our repertoir?

-Independence Day - for big AWESOME scenes. We're talkin' scale here.
-Lord of the Rings.
-Star Trek "Amok Time" Ta Ta Ta ta ta ta... on a loop for fights.
-Night Fight (big drums) from Crouching Tiger...
-for planar and demonic stuff we use a bit of industrial music - Event Horizon, the Quake themes by NIN.
-for gloomy dungeon atmosphere without cues - Alien vs predator soundtrack - the alien theme.
- Jawa music for lvl 1 encounters - kobalds and goblins
- Gladiator
- Holzt: The Planets
- The Carmen Burana for big fights -"source music for the "Apocalyptic Rave" a few years back - everyone knows it.
- Star Trek: First Contact and The Undiscovered Country has some great themes.
-Raiders of the Lost Ark has some awesome chase music.
- Myst soundtrack for magical mystical settings.

In the better known scores, we shy away from instantly recognizable themes ie Jaws and the main Star Wars theme - these are great but it's hard not to think Star Wars when you hear them. That's a disconnection.

Also - I flavor more than the fights and creepiness with these things. If the party visits a tavern, I play tavern music, and I use this throughout visits to town, and happy times.

Gregorian chants for visiting holy places.

Now this thread will run and run. Everyone has different opinions on what works well for a game and I could come up with a set of soundtracks for all kinds of things.

Ten soundtracks you need to buy yesterday - not all the tracks are perfect but our group plays them to death:

The Crow: The instrumental album is good fantasy and modern horror, the OST is a perfect Vampire backdrop.

Gladiator: Epic fantasy, grand battles and somber arias, Perfect for Dark Sun and good all-rounder.

Dracula: A natural for Ravenloft, steampunk and fantasy.
Useful for those 'enter the villain' moments.

Natural Born Killers: Modern/cyberpunk violence with a high body count doesn't get much better soundtracks...

Matrix: ...unless you have this. Modern/postmodern, not one to loop but good for selections.

Wild at Heart: Surreal mix of blues, classical, rock & roll.
And let's not forget the thrash metal. Odd and intriguing.

From Dusk Till Dawn: Forgive the dialogue clips, a nice spit-n' sawdust mix of guitars and desperation.

American McGee's Alice: Creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky. Victorian/Gothic. Very, very, very, cool.

Jurassic Park: Atmospheric, good background music and quite transplantable into any number of games.

Braveheart: OK, it has bagpipes but there is some very good music for fights and also quiet moment tracks too.

As an aside, do any of you GMs have soundtracks that inspire greatness while writing?

Our group has been using "atmospheric music" for years. We like movie soundtracks because they're prepared in advance, though they always tend to have at least one tune that doesn't suit the mood. We generally avoid vocals because we find them distracting. We avoid pop music for the same reason.

However, it is sometimes hard to find something new to listen to. I am just about sick of hearing the Batman and X-Men tracks for our Champions games. I've discovered that some "rave" type dance music such as Juno Reactor and Chemical Brothers is great for action in superhero games (and would probably work for something like Spycraft or d20 Modern as well). I also found a soundtrack from a skateboarding Nintendo game that works really well. You just have to try lots of different stuff. Try ethnic music too; it's great for fantasy games to give a different flavor to your campaign world.

Don't forget MP3.com as a fantastic source for any kind of music you could want -- most of the bands have plenty of free tracks as well as albums for sale. You'll find plenty of bands that you've never heard of and some really interesting stuff there (as well as some really odd stuff...).

There are also a number of sound effects companies that offer free or cheap samples for those times when you need a creaky door or clashing swords, too. A quick web search will turn up a bunch of 'em.

I have to disagree--or at least my skills as a DJ aren't up to the task of enhancing the game with music. I remember trying to match up our Space 1889 game with a John Adams piece, but it just got in the way. If the music's loud enough to really contribute to the game, it's too loud to talk over comfortably, particularly those swelling, martial parts that are good for fight scenes, or the launch of your steam powered space ship to Mars.

I listened to Thanatopsis last night at a party. It lulls you into an ‘exorcist’ sort of mood (I recommend that soundtrack too, especially if your players were freaked out by the movie…).

First I was made exceptionally happy by the inclusion of Dark Conspiracy on the list. Was is and will be my fav game.

On to music.

Dead can Dance is good for literaly all types of games. no joke. just don't over play them like our group has. :)

Always check out the "world music" section at cd stores. I feel that it is always good to have some realy exotic music for strange and foreign locals. I would recomend anything by Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn (esp. Exatcy), and any thing that is from Sufism (a type of Islam which has realy good music)

For any churchy religious moments or games Hildegard Von Bingen is recomended. Very choral church music.

And i cannot belive that this one isn't up there (maybe I missed it) but the Interveiw with a Vampire soundtrack has some realy good stuff on it.

well thats my 2 1/2 cents.

collin

The soundtrack to Pirates Of The Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl is useful for D&D games. Very swash-buckley.

Instrumental tracks work best for period piece and fantasy settings. As in the movies, the music is intended to always follow or even supply the emotional state of the characters or of the audience themselves (if the audience is party to info the characters lack.)

In particular, game soundtracks work very well because frequently they are built to be long playing and atmospheric.

The trick is to avoid the tracks that are too well known, which will only make characters think of the movie and not the game. I plan music in my campaigns almost as much as the story – scoring nearly all of the dm’s narrative revelations, sometimes timing big action cues with a flourish that occurs somewhere in the middle of a music track. When I pull this one off, some players get a big chill, because the effect is as if the music is following what *I’m* saying. Then they really feel like they are in a movie.

I find lyrics distracting, especially since the action in a game is all spoken, so you have to talk over the lyrics. Also - NEVER EVER even THINK of using song lyrics to give vital clues as to what is going on. It's metagaming, and it's very stupid. We had a GM that tried it on us - what did he think, that our characters had Peter Murphy cadaverously following us into the cyberpunk stronghold singing Bela Lugosi's Dead, so we'd know it was vamps?

Here’s some of my faves:

Independence Day – for “big scale”, by hans zimmer

Trinity and Beyond (The Atomic Bomb Movie) – The George Device –(beautiful and terrible, massive scale and beauty turning to horror)

Hellraiser 2 (big scale horror and intro, creepy horror)

The Suite from Se7en (howard Shore) – dread, rising to a crescendo

Dracula – a brooding and somber march

Gladiator

Raiders of the Lost Ark – the map room, desert chase

Star Trek TOS: Amok Time (tat a tat a tat a) – fight music, campy

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – Night Fight – percussive fight music

Mission impossible 2 – Mano a mano – by hans zimmer (a plodding and percussive, careful track – slow mo fight)

Star Trek – The Wrath of Khan (nautical)
Titanic – any of the sinking track (nautical)

Star Wars – Jawa music – creepy, little (kobald music)

Any Lord of the Rings music

Riven soundtrack (game) – magical, mysterious

Alien vs predator game– the alien tracks – creepy atmospheric - long

Glory – military

Holst's The Planets is good and has an old Star Trek feeling - Mars is especially good for fights.

Carmina Burana is another familiar classic for fights.

when i first started running back in the day i
almost always used type o negative,the cult,sisters of mercy etc but always background and low
i now run d&d and tend to use classical (to suite the game combat heavy booming classics for example) or enya type music played low in the background even though my players want heavy thrash metal ALL THE TIME LOUD
when my mate runs SLA they tend to get it so much you cant almost communicate oh well!!!