For battles, sometimes I do a mix from the Total Annihilation soundtrack. Makes for a nice, frantic feel, which I often want for combat.
For other purposes, I really like the Republic Commando soundtrack. Jungles, old ruins, Sith temples, other dark and/or foreboding places...
For battles, sometimes I do a mix from the Total Annihilation soundtrack. Makes for a nice, frantic feel, which I often want for combat.
Ahh the memories!! I had forgotten the awesomeness of that soundtrack!!
For classic adventure themes that feel similar to Star Wars or Indiana Jones, look at the main themes from Willow and Beetlejuice . For a bit more contemporary pieces, check out some of Hans Zimmer's tracks from Inception and Interstellar .
I use music in all my games, be it Star Wars, Cthulhu, Pathfinder, or Star Trek.
I run everything off my laptop anyway, and I prepare for a game by summarising the adventure in a Word document. In each section, I'll just add something like "Starship Ambience" or "Entering the Base" or "Asteroid Battle" or somesuch, and hyperlink each topic to a piece of music I've chosen in advance. I never have it up loud, but it's always satisfying to see the players' eyes widen when they're entering somewhere supposedly safe and I kick off the Imperial March as they realise it's swarming with stormtroopers.
I play only Star Wars music. Any of the movies are fine but I usually stick with what I have on my dropbox, so A New Hope & Empire soundtracks. I'm trying to work in songs from the newer movies as well. I don't always keep up with making sure music is always playing as I like to pick and choose the music for the scene so it's appropriate and sometimes we get so into the game that we forget about the music.
21 hours ago, GroggyGolem said:I play only Star Wars music. Any of the movies are fine but I usually stick with what I have on my dropbox, so A New Hope & Empire soundtracks. I'm trying to work in songs from the newer movies as well. I don't always keep up with making sure music is always playing as I like to pick and choose the music for the scene so it's appropriate and sometimes we get so into the game that we forget about the music.
I'm prepping for a new AoR campaign starting around Easter at the moment, and I'm incorporating music from the original and prequel trilogies, TFA, Seasons 1 & 2 of Rebels, The Clone Wars, and even a sprinkling of stuff from "The Old Republic". I love using those other sources, because while they "feel" like Star Wars, they're not as immediately recognisable to my players.
44 minutes ago, Daronil said:I'm prepping for a new AoR campaign starting around Easter at the moment, and I'm incorporating music from the original and prequel trilogies, TFA, Seasons 1 & 2 of Rebels, The Clone Wars, and even a sprinkling of stuff from "The Old Republic". I love using those other sources, because while they "feel" like Star Wars, they're not as immediately recognisable to my players.
Tonight one of my players took over for being music director. He put on the band Galactic Empire, which has a new album of music that's all star wars songs but done in the style of metal. It's fantastic.
Regarding background music, I try to keep really low profile, as it can become distracting, but mostly I sort it into cantina music, which I divide into Jatz (original Cantina theme and other swing/jazz songs), Rock (instrumentals of aint no rest for the wicked, come with me now and similar stuff) and Country (mainly Johnny Cash instrumentals). Then I have a small playlist with combat music, with the common star wars combat themes mixed with Medal of Honor Frontline, and chase music, an assortment of mainly video game tracks (Splinter Cell for example). Video game music is imo a good source for these kind of things, for temples and dungeons I mostly use Zelda dungeon tracks.
What I find more interesting, in our new campaign I started assigning musical themes to important NPCs (and, to a lesser degree, planets, cities, etc.), and it works rather well I think. For example, a corrupted crazy Jedi has Hysteria by Muse, both the original instrumental and the very awesome 2Cellos version; a scientist working on Ilum got Vivaldi's Winter; an Imperial admiral has the Cutler Beckett theme from Pirates of the Caribbean; a Sith with the Alive and Confrontation instrumentals from the Jekyll and Hyde musical; and a slick entrepreneur/crimelord has Seduce me from the TF2 soundtrack. A thing I'm especially looking forward to is a cantina that plays music by Beast (the Canadian duo, not the Korean boy band), and the singer of the band will be a potential ally or enemy (so what the players hear irl, their PCs hear ingame).
Star Wars RPG Cantina (not just Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes on endless kriffing loop)
Star Wars RPG Jedi/Sith Combat
www.tabletopaudio.com