Hello!

Right to it. I'm thinking about having some ambient war sounds on when my players gets into the thick of it. Thing is, I'm having a hard time finding any that fits. The Dawn o War II game seem to have some great ambient war sounds, but I can't find that either. Sooo... Anyone have any nice ambient war sounds, or know where I can find some?

Reclusiarch said:

You mean sounds of war? What kind of ambients are you looking for?

Alex

Call of Duty?

I dont see us using this anytime in the near future, too many Iraq/Afghan war vets in our group to risk offending/freaking out.

Yes, ambient war sounds, like gunfire and cannons etc.

I think you'll enjoy this one:

http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=90766

One group I gamed with a few years ago played a game of Weird Wars ; a D20 World War II based game for those unfamiliar. The GM put the opening of Saving Private Ryan ; the Storming of Normandy, on surround and repeat (somehow) for the first session.

Guess what our first session was?

He didn't pull any punches, either. And when there was only one PC left alive, the sound of bombers incoming could be heard... German Bombers... And just as the first of the bombs exploded on the beach, that one remaining PC woke up from their nightmare. D-Day had been a week ago. The Allies had taken the beach and fortifications and were slowly pushing inland...

-=Brother Praetus=-

You can actually get a lot of sounds from video games. Many games that are capable of being modded have had their sound files extracted out.

When I ran some military RPGs in the past, I used sounds I extracted myself from Half-Life 2. Not only did that game have pre-made ambient battle noise that worked great in a long loop, it also had individual gunfire, explosions, rocket launches, etc...

I then used a program called RPG sound mixer to create sound scapes where certain sounds would play randomly, processed with various effects and volumes. I could write simple scripts to string together various sounds into segments, or continuous random soundscapes that never ended and never repeated. The program also had a sound board so I could play certain sounds by pressing a button.

This made for more atmospheric games, but it could also add to planning and design times before games. But, when you're pressed for time and don't want to make up sound effects on the fly, it's a good way to go.

There was a special edition of the "Traitor General" book from Black Library which had a soundtrack cd supplied with it. The album is now available on the composer John Bergin's website : http://www.grindertool.com (look under 'music archive'). One of the tracks "Gereon resists" has battle sounds in the background at about the 5:10 mark. You should be able to find the track on youtube if you want a preview. If you don't want to skip ahead to that point each time you could use a audio editing program such as 'Audacity' (free) to copy the battle sounds portion.

The Mutant soundmixer comes with quite a nice selection of ambient combat sounds

http://www.stefanisberg.com/mutant/Mixer_eng.html

-Skallagrim