I am playing in a very successful but new campaign of TOR here locally and one of the things I'm doing is using the soundtracks and complete recordings of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to add ambience and depth to the game. However, I am seeking a guide to each track that just has a few basic sentences or remarks for each track I can look off of to know what kind of song it is in terms of scenes so I can use the music to the best effect I can.

Has anyone worked on anything like this for the regular soundtracks and the complete recordings?

I've tried that, but even with the notes to play a certain track on cue, it was too much work to switch tracks while running a game. Too distracting, and it stopped the game too often. I just ended up letting the disc play through. Maybe if I had an assistant GM to take care of the music, I'd try it again. Of course, this is just my experience; others may have been more successful.

The Lord of the Rings Online - Riders of Rohan soundtrack is another good fit for music. Rousing and menacing themes. I agree with letting the CD run through rather than fiddling about, but you could sort the tracks on to separate CDs. Think about the themes in the adventure and pick the relevant music for the theme. If the adventure session is likely to be dark in theme, then the tracks selected should be the darker ones.

Further thoughts: perhaps listen to the soundtracks with a note pad and jot themes that come to mind. Then mess around with MP3 playlists to see which tracks in the same theme work together. Once you've got enough tracks for the theme, burn to CD to play during the session. Have the CD on loop and in the background.

i use the last of the mohicans ost. it suits wilderness theme of the campaign. i just play it in full and somehow it fits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1ryJDVuZ6k

ddl would have made a swell aragorn.

I am not the Loremaster so it doesn't bother me much to change the track to something appropriate for the scene at hand.

Are you using the ready-made soundtracks from Cub7? http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL58275DC5EC3EABD8


BTW, Cat: SACRILEGE !!! I'm happy that DDL got his Oscar this week, and the Last of the Mohicans music is awesome (I'm listening to it now, courtesy of the link you posted), but Viggo is the right man to play Aragorn.

@ Beruthiel's Cat.

Yup, Viggo was excellent but if I had been casting for the trilogy, I would have chosen DDL as Aragorn.

i like viggo too, don't worry. in perfect world we would have numerous adaptations of LOTR - from boorman to jackson.

oh, and i used this in my pendragon campaign (taht never really was finished - what a shame)...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HujjNQPv2U

it is ring without words. in other words wagner sans fat lady.

I have a large collection of mp3's from various sound tracks, I keep them on my gaming laptop and play them at games.

LOTR (Howard Shore's music from all 3 movies), Conan the Barbarian, StarShip Troopers (actually any Basil Pouldouris is great for gaming), Alien 1 & 2, Braveheart, Willow

I also have some Glass Hammer, Brobdingnagian Bards, David Arkenstone(has some great gaming themed albums,including his "Music Inspired by Middle Earth" CD and "Celtic Book of Days" CD), Blackmores Night, some Rush, various Celtic groups and many others.

So what I have done is create playlists arranged according to the theme; Battles, Town, Horror, Peaceful, Dramatic.

Then I play the appropriate playlist. I agree that its too distracting to be a DJ while GM'ing a game.

Can't argue that notion.

then again, ddl could make just about a good anything!



Other soundtracks that are good: robin hood (kevin costner version), dances with wolves, and if you need darker themes: anything by Elfman - especially Nightbreed. Conan is another great one. Narnia is also good.

For scenes in elf-woods, anything Celtic, or Gaelic would work well. And one more great recording I stumbled on one day while listing to my Rhapsody program:

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Earth-Sky-Ga...f/dp/B0000AM6JT


Very nice mood music for such a game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHDmXtW9Yx0


I made an mp3 of the first 30 seconds of this looped.

Sometimes when the players near a point in the story where there is the potential for (or definitely will be) combat with at least six or more humans/orc/humunoids AND at least one player notices through a passive (I roll) Awareness/Perception/Sixth Sense -- I sneak this in the background of whatever mood music is playing.

For example one time a player overheard something that tipped him off -- a rustle, the clink of metal on metal, the sound of a bow string being pulled taut, whatever. The players were discussing how to cross a stream that was moving at a pretty good clip.

I told them, "Orn says in a low voice, 'Be quiet..... Listen.'" It took them 10 seconds to make out the faint drums in the background, at which point I flipped off the mood music and tagged the whole track for play (sans the voice).

One player said, "Sh!t! Everyone in the water now!" Which they did as the arrows rained down on where they had been standing. They were swept downstream and the chase began.

Editing out 2:00 - 2:39 great improves the song, btw.

I hadn't heard that in years, thank you.

I have setup iTunes playlists for each of the scenes I expect to encounter during the session I am running. Then it is simply just a matter of selecting the playlist and playing it. Some playlist might only have one song on a loop where others might be several played back to back. This seems to work fairly well. I also have one playlist for just filler music based on the region they are in like dark and gloomy for inside Mirkwood or up beat for in the Beorning lands.

As for music I am using the LOTRO soundtrack, David Arkenstone's "Music Inspired By Middle Earth" and Jamie Christopherson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II".

I found the original sound track for the Rankin/Bass Hobbit cartoon. It includes songs not in the movie or not sung entirely.

And if you get annoyed with your players, you can punish them with Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

Oh, The Ring! What could be better for The One Ring than "The Ring"? Nice !! Seriously, I didn't know you could get the Ring without the opera singers. I like!

Ugh !! NO !!!

There are international regulations on the use of torture. This exceeds them all.

I assume people here know that Daniel Day Lewis turned down the role of Aragorn (I think multiple times in fact). He was a top choice at one point.

After that Stuart Townsend was picked but replaced after a few days of filming.

Viggo did a tremendous job though. Really worked perfectly.

As for music there is whole ton of Middle Earth inspired music at Radio Rivendell.

For TOR, I use the three LotR film soundtracks, the LotR animated film soundtrack, The Hobbit film soundtrack, LotR Online soundtrack, LotR Online: The Riders of Rohan soundtrack, the BBC LotR and The Hobbit soundtracks (the radio drama ones), The War in the North video game soundtrack, The Hunt for Gollum film soundtrack, TOR YouTube tracks, and The Last Days of the Third Age of Middle-earth video game soundtracks all converted to MP3, loaded onto a generic MP3 player (I loathe iTunes!!!!) and play them on shuffle. The timing of certain tracks is uncanny at times...dramatic role-play coinciding with dramatic song cues, etc.

I do the same thing for my Cthulhu Invictus game (the Schwarzeneggar Conan films soundtracks, soundtracks from Age of Conan video game, Rome, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King, King Kong, 300, Kingdom of Heaven, The 13th Warrior, The Passion of the Christ, Hercules and Xena, and The Wind and the Lion).

Same for my Star Wars game (soundtracks from the seven films).

Consider Nox Arcana and Midnight Syndicate stuff, too.

Wagner's music actually works really well in rpgs. I'm an opera buff myself, so I have no problem using it. My players wouldn't like it, though.

Sorry, but I wouldn't be able to get past the "Kill the Wabbit!" theme.

I have both the complete recordings of all the LotR movies and The Hobbit. I also have the normal soundtracks for all the LotR films. Should I just only use the complete recordings? If I did, would I be missing anything at all from the normal soundtracks?

The regular recordings are just re-cut and re-mixed versions of the cues. Sometimes it appears they use alternate takes and bring up different instruments but all of the music from the films (and some that didn't make it to the films) are in the complete recordings.

Here's another find: Sam Gamgee's song in Fellowship of the Ring (the book, not the film), sung by none other than JRRT himself!

The Troll Song