User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 VTTs Enhanced panel
ANDREW WHITE: Hello, I'm Andrew White, I'm Paizo's digital product lead, and if you are a virtual tabletop player or just someone who likes to use digital tools to enhance your in-person games, we've got a ton of stuff at PaizoCon this year for you to check out, some of which hopefully you've already gotten to see.
We had our online tools showcase yesterday, we had a Roll20 panel this morning, we got all kinds of cool stuff going on in the various Discord stages and elsewhere on this very channel including, I think later on we've got demos from Bissell Bruise, Dungeon Alchemist, a bunch of others.
I only have an hour to work with here, that's not nearly enough to talk about all the cool new digital stuff that you can look forward to over the next year or so, so I'm just going to focus on a couple.
One, our upcoming Monster Core Token Pack for Foundry Virtual Tabletop with full support for Foundry v12's Dynamic Token Rings, I mentioned that yesterday with Kino.
Two, a full conversion of the standalone module, Pray For Death, which we can now tell you will give your PCs a front row seat to the God of Worgen and ganked by a giant bug, deluxe module treatment for the Starfinder playtest, we've got some members of the volunteer dev team here with us today who will be talking a bit with us about that later, and all the adventures in the workplace scenarios and of course ongoing support for all upcoming adventure paths.
One thing we did just launch recently that I'm super excited about was our partnership with Michael Ghelfi Studios, they're now going to be producing full album length original soundtracks for our adventure paths going forward.
Seven Dooms for Sandpoint One already came integrated with the Foundry Virtual Tabletop module that we released, and also just yesterday I believe just became available on Spotify, and we've got lots more coming.
I had the opportunity earlier this week to talk to Michael as well as one of his composers, Philip Milliman, who's been working on the music for us, and of course John Compton and James Jacobs, the lead developers on the Season of Ghosts and Wardens of Wildwood Adventure Paths.
We talked to them about the process of tailoring music to adventure paths, and we've got a segment to play for you on that right now.
So let's go to the tape.
ANDREW WHITE: Hi, I'm Andrew White, digital products lead here at Paizo, and joining us today are our two adventure path development leads, James Jacobs and John Compton, as well as Philip Milliman and Michael Ghelfi from Michael Ghelfi Studios, who have been composing original music for our adventure paths and will continue to be composing original music for our adventure paths going forward, so that we have original soundtracks to go with all of our adventure paths and all of our digital virtual tabletop adventure path modules, which is super exciting. We just recently released the Foundry virtual tabletop version of Seven Dooms for Sandpoint with an entire soundtrack already integrated, and we're going to be putting that up on the Paizo store soon as a separate purchase, and as I'm sure that Michael and Philip will be talking to you about soon, the Wardens of Wildwood and Season of Ghosts soundtracks are also well into development, and you should be able to hear those as well soon.
So hi guys, thanks for joining us.
Thanks so much for the invitation.
So let's, I guess let's start by talking a little bit about what you do and how you do it.
I think that's sort of a question across the board, you can just start with Michael and Philip, how did you get into this?
What brought you to composing music for tabletop RPGs, other than the fact that music and tabletop RPGs are awesome?
Philip, would you like to start?
Sure, yeah, well, for me, it was around my, when I was 26 or 27, I know that's when I discovered TTRPG, Worldrealm, you know, and I got into that through my friend who introduced me with the person called Christian Svelzen, and he's a developer for Black Void. And that was like my first soundtrack I composed for TTRPGs.
And before that, I didn't even play Dungeons and Dragons and everything else. But it was really excited for me because that's something new.
And before that, I was writing just music for myself and for some, I don't know, couple of trailers and such, and that didn't work well.
But after I was done with the soundtrack, I was immediately drawn into this world, you know, and like how the things actually work within the TTRPG community. And I loved it.
And ever since then, I was writing music for tabletop games. And a couple of years after, I met Michael, and, you know, we started working together and here we are today.
Nice, so I keep going.
So about me, I started playing tabletop games, different TTRPGs when I was 22, a friend got me into it.
I was a player.
I thought he was not organizing enough games, so I thought, why not becoming the DM myself. And since I love when things are very immersive, I thought, you know, I make music on the side, let's make my own ambiences because I could not find good ambiences on YouTube. And I made some and I thought, let's show them.
And a few years later, we had the largest ambiences channel on YouTube for tabletop games.
I was also doing music on the side, but I was really bad at it. It's really not my thing. I mean, comparatively to other composers, I don't have the level for music, but I'm very good at ambiences and sound effects, maybe because it's less figurative and more realistic.
It's maybe more in line with my mind and by the randomness of life, I don't know why I crossed the path of Philippe and I saw the best composer I ever met. I had a lot of respect for what I heard for the guy.
And as I always say with Philippe, he's very chaotic, but incredibly original in this composition. And I'm not chaotic at all.
I love organization and it was like the opposite meeting and that really worked. That works so well. So we started working together. It was one-man project and it turned into MGS.
And then Liar RPG Music joined us and many other people.We are now about 10.
And a few months ago, we released Opus, which is a new tabletop audio management tool for Dungeon Masters. That was the last step of our development, creating our own tool. And since we have the largest tabletop audio library available, we thought we needed to put that into a tool.
So yep, that's the whole path. I hope it was not too chaotic.
The explanation I'm in.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of using music when I'm GMing games.
I will often spend many hours putting together long elaborate playlists of music stolen from various soundtracks for every possible event and I go, this is a combat. What if this combat takes place in a cave? What if this combat takes place at sea?
Oh, this would be a cool trap to play for the big bad evil guy who I assume will definitely show up and have plenty of time to monologue before the players immediately start attacking them. Never happens.
Yeah, it's something I enjoy doing, even though in actual practice, it very rarely works out the way that I intend for it to do, but that's kind of GMing in a nutshell. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
James and John, I'd be curious to know what your experience is using music in your games, whether they're games that you're running or games that you're playing in, or just in general, your thoughts on music and DTRPGs.
Cool. I've always loved using music and RPGs, not necessarily during the game itself, but when I'm riding an adventure or creating content, I love having music in the background that kind of inspires me.
I will often pick specific composers or soundtracks for movies or such to help guide my inspiration when I'm creating stuff. I did use a musical puzzle once back in college where I had my little synthesizer keyboard and I used a Sharpie because you could wipe these off the plastic keys, but I drew magic runes on all of the keys, and then the player characters had to figure out which song to play to cause these bells to ring in this underground cavern to open up a door, and they had to pick up these different compositions throughout the place. It's always fun in town, right?
Yeah.
And always just using music in end games as part of the storyline, like in the Song of Silver in Hell's Rebels is a song that you have to learn and perform in order to give your PCs advantages over the devils and the evil in the air.
I guess bard is my favorite character class, so that's also a big part of it. I didn't really start using music as an accompaniment in games I was running until I started playing with other folks like Wes Schneider and Chris Young, and a couple other folks really used it well.
Wes in particular had this really great stunt where he'd use music just to set the ambiance, like gothic music for a horror game or something like that, and he would have all of these different tracks picked out for different encounters and stuff, but the thing that really impressed me with what he was using it for, every game you run, there's going to be a point where everybody's chatting or looking on their phones or distracted or not really paying attention to what you, the GM, are trying to do and set things up.
He would just sit back and let us talk for a little bit, and he would slowly use his remote control to turn up the soundtrack on the volume, turn it up slowly but surely until everybody started realizing there's creepy music coming from somewhere, what's going on, and it would focus everybody on him, and then he could turn the music down and take over the game again, and it was a really subtle way to not only get everyone's attention, but also set a mood for an upcoming encounters.
He also had something where he was able to blend tracks into one another pretty effectively, so you wouldn't even necessarily know when the background music was changing until like 10 seconds later when it would catch up to your brain and be like, oh hang on, hang on, hang on.
Yeah, he was really good at it.
Yeah, he's definitely one of the inspirations I've had early on for using music and gaming, and James's point about the musical puzzle is also really exciting because we deal with a lot of verbal cues with some visual grid-based cues when it comes to RPGs, and when you can have puzzles or any experience start to incorporate other senses, whether that's a musical puzzle or whether that's like handing out a tactile thing or some sort of handout, then it engages not only your players on a deeper level, but it can also engage some of the players who are more tuned to certain cues in a way that they might not otherwise get.
And so I have a player in one of my regular games that has aphantasia, where she can't visualize things based on description. She has to see an image, but some other stuff can perfectly work well to inspire or evoke emotions within her, and so music can be one of those cues.
As far as I'm concerned, I came from an RPG background of putting down some pencils on a table to act as walls, and so I'm an ad-lib GM at heart, and the idea of pre-printing out maps or coming up with a long playlist of songs is difficult for me.
But I did experiment a little bit with Syrinscape, for example, in setting up wilderness soundtracks and sound effects, and kind of using that same Wes effect that James referenced of slowly turning up the volume or frequency of certain things to signal that, oh, that roaring dinosaur that you've been hearing in the background for the past hour of gameplay, it's louder than it was before.
The other thing that I'll bring up early on that maybe we can get into a little bit later is that because I'm improv or focus on verbal communication GM, music has oftentimes been something that's difficult for me to incorporate into games, partly because it's one more thing for me to juggle as a GM, and some GMs are a lot better than others, but also because I have done a lot of my gaming in organized play settings at conventions where it's loud, where you don't necessarily have a good internet connection, where even if you set up a subwoofer under the table, it might not actually convey the music to your six-foot-wide table because of all the background noise.
So it's only in the past few years that I've really been doing more home gaming of late that I can control that environment and make the most of music.
Well, yeah, I have also tried to incorporate music into games and conventions by trying to play it on my phone.
And even if it wasn't incredibly loud around there, the awkwardness of being able to recently just lean over and tick-tack something out of your phone and try and find the track and whatever is, it's less than ideal.
That's another benefit actually, I think, of playing in a virtual environment is that in a lot of virtual tabletops, there is some sort of player for music that's already built in, and especially the stuff that we've been producing ourselves, we make a point of making it so that all of those tracks are at your fingertips so that when a battle begins or you enter a scene that specifically has music that was designed to accompany it, you don't have to go digging around or anything, you can just play it automatically.
So James, you mentioned that you enjoy playing music while you are developing some of these adventures or doing writing.
I'd be curious to know whether or not you ever, whether those are the same thematic influences that also drive your thoughts on what would be good music to accompany that action at the table.
We all had meetings together prior to Philip and Michael starting to work on these soundtracks where we talked about influences and inspirations and general sort of thematic overarching themes of the adventures that we were being worked on that they thought would translate well into music and other movie soundtracks and musical works that accomplish a similar goal.
I'm just wondering, I'm interested in hearing more about your thoughts on how that process works, really from all of you, because these are meetings that we all had together and I was mostly sitting on the sidelines for them just letting you guys rip off each other and it was fascinating just hearing some of this stuff.
Traditionally I'd pick something like this nostalgic or something that I'm really familiar with like Duran Duran is a big from growing up in the 80s movie soundtracks, particularly stuff by like John Carpenter that's really strong on the ambience and just the sort of almost the trance-like element of the electronic stuff helps me just to focus, but it's also the music that I enjoy so much and I'm so familiar with.
The soundtrack to Conan is a great example that shows up every time it seems when somebody's playing a fantasy game with music enabled. But that sort of just kind of tunes out like the outer world of distraction and helps me just focus on things.
But I have done things, like when I was working on Seven Dooms for Sampling with this Sampling illustration behind me, when I was working on that one I did bring up some music to listen to that had more of a sort of a, I guess, I don't know what I'd call it, but just like the creepy epic dungeon crawling theme.
Again, the Conan soundtrack obviously is one that plays into it, but other soundtracks for movies like Bernard Herrmann's Descent into the Depths or A Journey to the Center of the Earth was a great soundtrack. It's got a lot of brass and just big loud echoing noises make it feel like you're in a cavern underground.
I was also going to mention Descent in other movies of where it's like you're crawling around in the underground and everything's like kind of this creepy sort of vibe. And it really helps me to, if I'm familiar with the music, it's not distracting while I'm writing, but it's also just music just inspires so much in my personal creativity because I just can visualize like an encounter playing out to a certain theme or something like that.
Now that I've listened to some of the soundtracks you guys have created for Season of Ghosts and Semdun for Sandpoint, it's sort of a chicken and the egg situation where it would be interesting to get one of these soundtracks completed before we even start working on it, which I don't know how we would even do that, but having that kind of guide the creation process would be an interesting experiment, but that's pretty tricky for a lot of reasons.
I've got an idea, an adventure pass specifically designed where everybody is puppets and the whole goal is that the musical soundtrack is devised before anybody starts writing any of the adventures and all the puppets have to literally dance to the tune that you've established ahead of time.
Nice.
There's also, like I mentioned earlier, the song is silver, but we've also done other songs like the Goblin song was one of the first things I wrote for Pathfinder way back in the day, or there's a song that I created for a character in Crimson Throne. I've always loved poetry and writing song lyrics and stuff like that, even though I'm not really good at composing the actual music to it.
It's just a really fun way to engage a part of my brain that isn't the more technical element of like, here's this encounter, here's what's going on. You don't really get a lot of chance aside from maybe read aloud text to really engage in the lyrical part of the writing.
I try to infuse a lot of that into the writing itself so that when a GM's reading an encounter, they're being entertained by just beautiful, as I can make it, language that makes it more fun for them and inspire them.
But when you get to things like poetry or songs or things that you find in-world, it's a different sort of creativity that I really enjoy exploring and having some of those songs and such put to music.
I wrote several of them for the sidebars in the big Absalom book, for example, and I always have in my head this song is sung to a certain established lyric and then I kind of keep that quiet because that's copyrighted material and I don't want folks going around singing the Goblin song to a specific song that is very recognizable.
But it's fun, just looking at different types of music, like I was writing back in the Dragon magazine days, would write little poems for all these Demon articles like Dagon got a sea shanty and Kostichkai got sort of an old-timey Beowulf epic and it's just a great way in a short amount of time to convey a really powerful emotion and music does that so much better I think because it can get to you through your ears while you're focusing on the visuals of what's going on and it can be subtle or overwhelming and it's just exciting seeing us work with you guys to get these soundtracks going.
Then I have, I think, a good news because you spoke about the song from the Crimson Throne and Philippe actually composed a soundtrack to it, to actually a song, the Spirit song, I think that's the name, yep, he made a song, he recorded it a few years ago but it was just out of a pure fun project and we still have the song and we do plan to share it and now that we can do it.
He did share it with me, it's pretty cool, it's wild hearing something like this like "that sounds really good".
It was never meant to happen, you know, I was just conversing with my friends who had an actual podcast of Crimson Throne and they asked me just one day "hey, what do you feel about doing this song" and I'm like "okay, let's do that" and it ended up like an actual song and like Michael mentioned, it's really exciting that we had the opportunity to release that for the audience to hear the song.
Can you say next month?
We can release it for next month, Philippe, right?
I think so. Whenever you want. I've done my part.
It's a great example of just how collaborative the whole process is where it's like you get different people with different strengths and they create something I think is greater than the sum of its parts and it's a case of like where I think we've been impressing each other and inspiring each other so it's good that I'm excited to bring this to just folks who want to listen to music either if it's just listening it to while they're writing or on a drive or as part of the game.
That's something that's so widespread in the TTRPG community in general.
That's my feeling.
I never had any negative experiences in that regard and I feel like we all enrich each other artistically through all the different creations we found out.
It's crazy how you can just take any adventure for almost any TTRPG and you find people who made some fan content or just passion content that improve your experience for any kind of preference you have.
So if you're into music, you find music. If you're into maps, you find maps and the quality and pure genius of some creations. I'm not speaking about MGS, I'm speaking in general. It's mind boggling knowing that even some of these people are not even professional. They just do that on the side and they can just create amazing things. And the opportunity that's for MGS, we had to make these as our jobs is only thanks to the community and to people like you at Taizo who recognize hard work and want to create a great project together.
It's so good. It feels amazing. I think it's cool also just having heavily ingrained with the tropes that are at the roots of TTRPGs.
These kinds of musical inclusions are like if you go back to The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, they're singing all the time. There's all kinds of poems and songs and marketing songs and exploration songs and every version of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or someone that's ever been put to film has its own interpretations of those.
I realize there are differing opinions on the original like Rankin/Bass versus The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but you got to admit you go back and you listen to some of those. There's some great music in there like the original, certainly very different from our Goblin song, but the musical version of the initial Goblin song when the Goblins show up in the Misty Mountains has basically been stuck in my head for 30 plus years because it just fits perfectly.
I wanted to talk to you guys also specifically you mentioned that so obviously if you're composing music for a movie soundtrack or a predetermined narrative of some kind, you obviously know exactly when the high points are, when specific events are going to occur that you have a particular theme to go with.
How do you go about composing music that by definition has to accompany actions that are wildly unpredictable?
You may know certainly where certain events are likely to happen. You can even propose a theme for an area, you can pose a theme for a specific NPC and combat music I think in general you can probably compose for, but how do you design music to accompany events that you can't foresee?
Okay, well from my point of perspective it was always like this.
I never actually wrote that I need to have a combat song or an exploration song. Usually I tell a story and sometimes I think that you can't satisfy everyone's opinion. We get a lot of those comments like hey this song shouldn't be the exploration, this could be combat.
I mean it's up to you, you can use it however you want, but for me it's much easier if I have some context like in this case when I read some of your adventures and when I compose the song for it, but usually I just go with the flow and I expect for the best.
I can't really explain it, but I think it's just an intuition and I think that all of us creators feel the same in our specific niches of our line of work and the feedback is always important if you're working for someone or with someone to go back and forth to establish how the song, the final product will work, what to get and so far I can only say that usually many of my songs were just complete and they worked and I don't know.
I just rely on my intuition and I hope for the best, there's nothing more to it actually, but I'm certain that some of our other composers, colleagues would have the other experiences and work processes.
If I may add to that, Philippe, you also take into account by example the culture of the people that would be involved in specific combats or scenarios.
If you know there is a likely combat between the NPCs and let's say goblins, you take into account who are these goblins, how they live, what's their technological level, that kind of stuff to select your instrument and the rhythm and the amount of complexity you add to the song and that's funny because you speak from an intuition point of view and I think these elements, you just made them yours and it's really hard to translate that as words because your medium to share these feelings is music and that's how you can express them the best, where writers would write paragraphs about how they select the words that they selected and yeah, I like this, sorry, I lose my words in English, but you get my point.
As you said, we best communicate through music and it was for me always the medium through what I can actually communicate with people and it's very difficult to explain my work process but as you mentioned, yeah, the intuition like I mentioned, it's important but also the experience, like I've been composing music for 15 years now and I've heard so many goblins, so many work songs and I just use that and transcribe into my own idea and then the things happen.
I don't know, it's just like that but yeah.
- But I like what you said about subjectivity for the DMs and players, that's something I see a lot on our, a lot, not so much but I see on comments on our YouTube videos, when
I make ambiences, ambiences are more realistic and less figurative than music, by example, if I add the sounds of ghosts in the background, some people would say ghosts should be more ethereal or ghosts should be, we should be able to understand what they say and you have different opinions and it's based on the setting the players and DMs are usually playing in and their own understanding of it.
And since all of you are Dungeon Masters, you know that we all have a different way of playing an adventure, even though the adventure is thoroughly described and yeah, described in so many details, we still do things differently and our players do things differently and so ultimately you have to find the common ground, maybe the more in the middle line to please everyone and then you do variations if you can for your tracks, for music it's a bit harder but yeah.
Yeah, what helps a lot about that is actually that, you know, our community through Patreon and all that, when you have the community of, you know, your own people, your own players that can give you the references, you know, and ideas every month, so you built your workflow around that, you know, and you know exactly what to write the next month and what's going to be satisfactory to your own players and your communities, so yeah.
But you can't satisfy everyone, you know, when it comes to that, I mean, like, but that's the beauty of this, you know, I'm not going to say a job because this is for me a pleasure, you know, a hobby that I do for a living and it's incredible but, you know, you just have to go for it and, you know, without risking it there's nothing that is going to happen and, you know, yeah well from what we've heard so far I think it absolutely speaks for itself, I think that anybody who's gotten a chance to take a look at the Seven Dooms for Sandpoint Foundry Virtual Tabletop Module has already heard that music and as soon as we get that up on the store, possibly by now, maybe we'll have it up on the store by now, right now during PISARCon,
I'll tell you as soon as we get back to the live segment, it's fantastic work and I can't wait to hear more about it.
Thanks.
Yeah.
One of the things I'll add to your earlier question, Andrew, because it sounds like you were kind of asking about pacing as well and what I've found is that I will have kind of some ambient background things I can just let play for, you know, an hour straight and not worry about it but when I'm planning out any music or the like, I'm thinking about what those scene changes in that movie would be because as you said, yeah, your movie you'll know that 34 seconds into the scene is when this climax happens or you know crescendo yadda yadda yadda.
And you can't do that when you're waiting for somebody at the table to add up the dice of their fireball spell and hope that they get it done in time because in the next minute and 13 seconds the second round should really be starting because that's when the music changes and so think about what the high points are.
When you want to start that musical change and kind of plan toward that. So the start of a scene happens, you got three minutes of music stuff and when it runs out it runs out or it repeats or whatever, that should be fine. It could even be a sort of thing where I would say, okay, I have this read aloud text that's coming up and I know that I've timed myself, it's going to be, you know, a minute 14 to read through it.
So I've decided that when I read this word is when I'm going to click the mouse button and start this other track because I know that it'll follow the pacing of the part of the game that I do control which is that block of read aloud text and that unified presentation moment and then once all the players and whatnot are doing their own things then all the timing is off and I just kind of have to let the music do its own thing or fade away now that it's done its thing and as a gem you just can't control the pacing any more than that.
All right, cool, well I want to thank everybody for joining us here.
Again all this stuff is going to be available, either is or will soon be available on our website at paizo.com and the Seven Dooms for Sandpoint module and Warriors of Wildwood and Season of Ghost modules are all available for Foundry Virtual tabletop on paizo.com right now and the music for two of those will be available soon and the music for one of them already is.
So yeah, I want to thank again, thank Michael and Philip and John and James for joining us.That was awesome.
We all could have talked for a whole lot longer and I look forward to having future conversations with you once we start getting to curtain call and triumph of the tusk. Thanks for the invitation.
We don't have to get a topic campaign idea, you got to run the campaign where every single player doesn't have a background, you only give them a musical track that you give them no context for but throughout the course of the campaign you'll occasionally play it when they're close to something that's important to their unknown backstory.
There is something I threw into the curtain call player's guide that suggests, since that's the adventure path where you create an opera, when you're creating your characters you should pick a theme song for your character. Who's going to write that music? It's going to be fun when we get to that.
Alright thanks everyone.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, bye.
Great talking with you.
And we're back, or we're live again I guess since we didn't get to go anywhere. Well thanks to the magic of that panel having been recorded a week ago, we now have two exciting new developments to announce.
Number one is we absolutely are doing that theme music thing for the curtain call virtual tabletop module. We will absolutely be somehow finding some way to let you give your player characters theme music and ideally giving you the ability to tie them to buffs or something just like James was suggesting. It's going to be awesome.
The other thing is that the track that Michael mentioned, the Spirit Song actually for Curse of the Crimson Throne, is now available for download. And can we throw the URL up on the screen real quick?
If you go to that URL right now you can download that free track, Spirit Song from Michael Ghelfi Studios for Curse of the Crimson Throne right now as a free sample as just another example of all the awesome music we look forward to for all of our other adventure paths now and in the future. So go check that out.