Dark Fantasy X Soundtrack

In the past, when this setting was various incarnations of Dark•Heritage instead of evolving in to Dark Fantasy X, I used to occasionally post "soundtracks" for the setting. What I meant by this was mood music of the correct theme and tone that I'd play quietly in the background while running the game to improve the ambiance. Professor DungeonMaster posted a video not that long ago; sometimes in 2021 at least, which I reacted to. He's moved away from using music altogether and now uses stuff like Michael Ghelfi's ambient sounds. I actually think that those are pretty cool; for $10 on bandcamp, you can buy the RPG Essentials pack that has 50 different tracks, all 30 minutes each that provide appropriate ambient sounds for your RPG. And then, if you really want to go crazy, he's got seven more volumes of comparable soundscapes. If you want to try before you buy, you can see what these are like on YouTube and Spotify too, I believe.

But I still like music, and I believe that Professor DungeonMaster is too concerned about choreographing the music to the game, as if you were a composer for a movie looking to fit your music to the edited cut and have all of the action have a resonant beat in the music. I think RPG music is much more impressionistic; just find something that has the right mood for the campaign (or at least the session) overall and put it on quietly enough that it's just kind of in the background, and it adds a lot to the experience. 

My previous attempts at showing a "Dark•Heritage Soundtrack" are pretty old; over ten years, in fact. For those, I just listed about a dozen or so movie soundtracks that I would use. Back in those days, we didn't stream music so much as I just burned them as mp3 to a CD-ROM and played them through my standard stereo/TV system. Because I'm old and I don't like changing something that I already like fairly well, I would still do that when hosting the game at my own house, probably—although for gaming on the go, or via Zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or whatever the online app of choice, I'm more likely to play from my computer (for online games) or my phone and a small portable bluetooth speaker for in person games.

These early attempts were when I still had a reasonably different approach to the game and its influences, although mostly they still work. I had some horror soundtracks; particularly Wolfman, Woman in Black, Van Helsing and Sleepy Hollow supplemented by some dark action movies, like the three Nolan Batman movie soundtracks, the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtracks, some video game soundtracks like Red Dead Redemption to get that frontier/cowboy vibe, and some Orientalism exotica like Prince of Persia, The Mummy, and Stargate. I would have optional add-ons from a few other movies, like the dark Victorian vibe of the two Sherlock Holmes movies with Robert Downey Jr., some tracks from The Godfather and stuff like that. You can see where I'm going with this; as my collection of movie soundtracks continued to grow and grow and grow (something that I've largely curtailed a bit in the years since) I found plenty of others that had the right sound. Some other Hans Zimmer's like King Arthur or Gladiator or The Last Samurai had rotation in there too. 

I didn't concern myself with whether or not the movie was any good, merely with whether or not the soundtrack was good and had the right mood and tone. In fact, sometimes the worse the movie, the better the choice for the music, because the players would be less familiar with it and wouldn't be distracted thinking about the movie during the game.

I actually still prefer this to the alternatives, and I still prefer most of the same soundtracks for the same reasons, although the Orientalism is less applicable, and the more overtly cowboy sounding tracks are a bit too on the nose since Dark•Heritage Mk. IV migrated to DH5 and then to Dark Fantasy X. 

I also experimented with some music that was created to be a bit more specifically backgroundish than even movie and video game soundtracks at one point, specifically the soundtracks created by Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana. These two used to have a rather mean-spirited rivalry between them, but the reality is that their music was largely the same to us on the customer side. Midnight Syndicate, you may remember if you're the right age, even specifically created an Official Dungeons & Dragons soundtrack in the early 00s. Of course, Nox Arcana had to put out a copy-cat album in the form of Blood of the Dragon. But for the most part, these were spookier soundtracks, and I discovered them at my local Halloween stores in the early 00s. For a while I quite liked them, but I thought the soundscapes were, after a while, a little too monotone for my taste. Too much synthesized vocal "aaaah"ing and organ, to make it sound like old-fashioned Gothic music. And the Nox Arcana stuff has about 4-5 tracks on every soundtrack (of 22 or so tracks) that have this corny spoken dialogue overlaying at least a portion of the music, which is completely unusable for a game.

I still like a few of the soundtracks enough that I could use them; especially Nox Arcana's Transylvania and Grimm Tales and Midnight Syndicate's Dungeons & Dragons (it's actually their best work) but other than that, I've kind of moved on from these guys. A year or two ago I was reminded of it for the first time in a few years, and I put it on in the background while writing and messing around with stuff. It was more forgettable and all of the albums too much the same than I remembered, mostly, but still it has its uses.

However, as music has become de-industrialized and de-centralized, this general niche has grown and improved. Back about the same time as I discovered Nox Arcana and Midnight Syndicate, I also discovered Sonic Legends due to some free giveaways of a samples from the rpgnow store, and it amazed me somewhat to think of people making music specifically for use during role-playing game sessions. 

Right now, my favorite RPG music maker is Travis Savoie, a French-Canadian guy from Montreal who does fan soundtracks for 5e campaigns, as well as a bunch of tracks with common RPG themes which he has released as his RPG Toolkit albums on bandcamp. I highly recommend his work, and you can hear shortened versions of much of it on Youtube or Spotify, but you can buy albums on bandcamp that have extended versions.