Gaming and music: Firing on all cylinders

For last week's Autumn Frontiers campaign, I queued up about 70 assorted metal songs and let 'em rip over the course of our 5-hour game. Among those was a record that I consider to be my campaign's muse: Wintersun, an album by a Finnish metal band of the same name.

Back when I was originally brainstorming ideas for my Points of Light-derived fantasy sandbox, I listened to Wintersun a lot. The songs, with their Viking/dreamland-inspired imagery, really juiced my imagination, and even today, it's easy to travel back to the halcyon days of that worldbuilding effort simply by putting on track 5, "Battle Against Time." That song—the melody, really, and the stadium-rock vocalization that opens the tune—never ceases to fire my creative pistons, evoking images of adventurers roaming across a vast, uncharted wilderness, exploring the ruins of past civilizations and spending hard-earned coin in shabby frontier villages—before heading out into the unforgiving lands to do it all over again. Good stuff.

As an aside, I glanced at the tracklist from last week's game. As near as I can tell, Wintersun came up toward the end of the session, as the party's wizard PC was fighting for his life on the windswept cliffs of the Darkwater Keep. In fact, his death very probably coincided with a Wintersun song titled "Death and the Healing," which boasts some very apropos lyrics.

Time is the death and the healing Take your last breath, 'cause death is deceiving Time is the past, now and tomorrow Days fly so fast and it leaves me so hollow

A snowstorm blew inside a wolf's eyes and the frozen tears covered all the mountainsides But then the time got by and the wolf died and someday that wolf would be I.

Sage advice indeed. UncleBear touches on designing a campaign soundtrack, and d7 over at the Seven-Sided Die compares rpgs to musical genres. It seems music is in the air. What type of music juices your campaign?

Euro-inspired fantasy gaming

I spent most of last week listening to the double-CD compilation album John Barleycorn Reborn, described by Warren Ellis as "dark folk" and subtitled "dark britannica." It's good stuff -- full of haunting, percussive melodies about fertility, sacrifice and the clash of Christianity with pagan Britain's roots.

It's got me jazzed to play some sort of proto-medieval fantasy game, one rooted in shamanistic magic, maybe with some sort of conquest element thrown in, that pits a peaceful indigenous people against some sort of inexorable invading force. I really dig the idea of an agrarian culture imbued with some sort commonly used, everyday magic -- that then crashes up against the spears and horses of some marauding force. It's a story that's formed the basis of any number of films; the three that come to mind right now are Dances With Wolves, 10,000 B.C. and Pathfinder. Never thought I'd ever find a reason to mention those last two in a sentence, but whatever....

Ars Magica evokes this setting really well, as does Tribe 8 (though the setting is dramatically different). There's got to be something out there more rooted in history and ancient cultures. Any other games out there that offer a little Euro-inspired fantasy?