atom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
	<title>RPG Ambience Blog</title>
	<id>http://blog.rpg-ambience.com/</id>
	<updated>2016-08-21T15:15:55+02:00</updated>

	<link rel="self" href="http://blog.rpg-ambience.com/atom.xml"/>
	<link rel="related" href="http://blog.rpg-ambience.com/"/>

	<author>
		<name>Jakob Kallin</name>
		<email>rpg.ambience@gmail.com</email>
	</author>

	<icon>http://rpg-ambience.com/images/icon.png</icon>
	<subtitle>Advice on bringing your games to life with the RPG Ambience media player</subtitle>

	<entry>
		<title>Strongholds, downtime, and <dfn>slow gaming</dfn> in tabletop RPGs</title>
		<id>/articles/slow-gaming</id>
		<updated>2016-08-20T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/bag-end.jpg" alt="The Dwarves in The Hobbit having dinner in Bag End" class="wide"/></figure><p>The term <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/rise-slow-gaming-our-cultural-antidote-angry-birds/"><dfn>slow gaming</dfn></a> has recently been used to describe <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakeShapiro/20121107/181073/On_the_advent_of_quotslow_gamesquot.php">video games with a slower pace</a> and without obvious, predefined goals. Like other parts of the “slow moment”, slow gaming encourages people to take their time with something in order to gain a deeper appreciation of it.</p>

			<p>While slow gaming is certainly a part of recent successes like <cite>Minecraft</cite>, <cite>Pokémon Go</cite>, and <cite>No Man’s Sky</cite>, there are also clear elements of slow gaming in older titles like <cite>Harvest Moon</cite>, <cite>The Legend of Zelda</cite>, and <cite>Shenmue</cite>. Even games that are not intended for slow gaming can sometimes be used for that purpose anyway; while <cite>Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag</cite> is ultimately centered around stealth, combat, and linear missions, I personally play it solely for the treasure hunting.</p>

			<h2>Slowness in tabletop RPGs</h2>
			<p>As with many other gaming innovations, one early source of slow gaming is the tabletop RPG hobby. Tabletop RPGs are often considered the first form of gaming to introduce a persistent world that exists and evolves between sessions. A persistent world is a central feature of many slow games, as it greatly increases the player’s chance to play the game at their own pace. While early tabletop RPGs may not have included slowness as a part of their rules, it is easy to imagine some of the first <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> groups spending entire sessions within the walls of the local tavern, simply gossiping between each other and interacting with NPCs.</p>

			<p>Another early feature of tabletop RPGs—made possible by a persistent world—is the idea of strongholds. A stronghold is a base of operations for PCs during a campaign, so beloved in <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> culture that their inclusion in <cite>Baldur’s Gate 2</cite> was one of that game’s main selling points. While a stronghold itself may not automatically lead to slow gaming—after all, the stronghold can be attacked by invaders or otherwise affected by troubles nearby—they are closely related to another concept that inherently promotes slow gaming: downtime.</p>

			<p>Downtime is the answer to a question that inevitably gets asked in a long-running campaign about adventurers in a persistent world: What do adventurers do between adventures? While downtime can be used simply for mechanical effects like healing, crafting, and training, many players seem instinctively attracted to the prospect of acting out their characters just living their daily lives.</p>

			<p>In a downtime “adventure”, the goal may be nothing more than stocking the nation’s best library or finding out which hero is stealing cookies from the cookie jar. One of the most vivid memories from my earliest <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> campaign involves the PCs enthusiastically decorating their new stronghold and discussing what color drapes they should put in, with the barbarian vigorously championing pink.</p>

			<p>Slow gaming is also closely related to sandbox play, which is a popular style of campaign that places PCs in a world where they, rather than their superiors or antagonists, drive the action. While sandbox play is easily combined with slow gaming, one does not necessarily lead to the other. In many sandbox campaigns, the setting has been designed with the same emphasis on clear goals as in a typical campaign, differing only in how and when PCs achieve those goals.</p>

			<h2>Features of slow games</h2>
			<figure><img src="/media/no-mans-sky.jpg" alt="A beach on a planet in No Man’s Sky" class="wide"/></figure><p>What are some common features of slow games? Below is a partial list:</p>

			<ul><li><strong>Self-defined goals:</strong> When PCs set their own goals, they have much greater control over their deadlines and the cost of failure. A lot of the time, this is the spark needed to finally slow down and reconsider the value of stressful goals. While GMs are traditionally taught to design adventures that “hook” the PCs with a sense of danger and urgency, that loses its importance when PCs create their own hooks. With self-defined goals, it is—sometimes literally—the PCs rather than the GM who are going fishing.</li>
				<li><strong>Flexible pacing:</strong> Needless to say, games that allow PCs to set their own pace are much easier to use for slow gaming, as the system is not getting in the way of their two-hour conversation with the king’s jester. Games inspired by movies (including any system that emphasizes “cinematic” play) are harder to use in this way, since they often assume that sessions will follow a certain dramatic structure. Just like movies such as <cite>The Hobbit</cite> and <cite>The Avengers</cite>, they can include downtime or stronghold moments between or before the action, but the rules will usually demand that these be the exception rather than the rule.</li>
				<li><strong>A living world:</strong> When PCs aren’t constantly reacting to threats or racing to find treasure, they inevitably get time to truly explore the world around them, and everyday details suddenly become an important part of the experience. When players treat the inn as merely a way of recovering HP, the innkeeper’s personality and background may not mean anything, but they can become the focus of entire sessions when the PCs spend a week in the inn during a severe adventure drought.</li>
			</ul><h2>Adding slowness to your game</h2>
			<figure><img src="/media/1001-nights.jpg" alt="The cover of 1001 Nights by Night Sky Games"/><img src="/media/golden-sky-stories.jpg" alt="The cover of Golden Sky Stories by Star Line Publishing"/><img src="/media/og.jpg" alt="The cover of Og by Firefly Games"/></figure><p>If the idea of slow gaming appeals to you, there are effectively two ways to create the slow experience for your own group: either switch to a system with slowness built in or add slowness to your current system.</p>

			<p>While the slow elements of most popular tabletop RPGs generally originate from culture rather than rules, there are games, especially indie titles, where slow gaming is not only possible but actually designed into the rules. Examples of such games include <a href="http://nightskygames.com/welcome/game/1001Nights"><cite>1001 Nights</cite></a>, <a href="http://starlinepublishing.com/our-games/golden-sky-stories/"><cite>Golden Sky Stories</cite></a>, and even <a href="http://firefly-games.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=54"><cite>Og</cite></a>. If you go this route, it is crucial to make sure that all players are excited about the premise of the game itself, or any slowness provided by the rules will quickly turn to dullness instead.</p>

			<p>If you are adding slowness to an existing system, there are without a doubt countless ways to slip them into the rules, but all of them carry some degree of risk. After all, the very idea of imposing slow gaming as a necessary goal goes against the concept of slowness itself. For better or worse, the only effective way of achieving slowness might be to let it develop on its own. It may well be a slow process—but wasn’t that what we were looking for all along?</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/slow-gaming</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Announcing the RPG Ambience Soundboard alpha!</title>
		<id>/articles/soundboard-alpha</id>
		<updated>2016-07-31T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>I’m happy to announce the public alpha of <a href="http://sound.rpg-ambience.com/">RPG Ambience Soundboard</a>!</p>

			<p>RPG Ambience Soundboard is a modified version of RPG Ambience with a few key differences:</p>

			<ul><li>It only plays audio, not images or text.</li>
				<li>It cannot be used to create or edit adventures. (You must use <a href="http://rpg-ambience.com/">RPG Ambience</a> for that.)</li>
				<li>It works on mobile devices.</li>
			</ul><p>RPG Ambience Soundboard is a step in the development of <a href="http://blog.rpg-ambience.com/articles/next-version/">the next version of RPG Ambience</a>. I started developing it because many users already use RPG Ambience for audio only, and because the lack of visuals makes development easier. For this reason, RPG Ambience Soundboard will also likely become the testing ground for new functionality in RPG Ambience.</p>

			<p>Note that RPG Ambience is still being developed, and RPG Ambience Soundboard will not in any way replace it. Once the next version of RPG Ambience is released, RPG Ambience Soundboard will be either offered alongside RPG Ambience or merged into it. As I use both audio and visuals in my own games, I can guarantee that both elements will continue to be equally important to RPG Ambience.</p>

			<p>I have added the “alpha” label to RPG Ambience Soundboard for two specific reasons:</p>

			<ul><li>Features may be added, removed, or changed at any time without testing or announcements, and no stability is guaranteed.</li>
				<li>The app itself may eventually be merged into RPG Ambience itself and thus never receive a proper release.</li>
			</ul><p>This first version of RPG Ambience Soundboard is very bare-bones and might not have every feature that you expect, but I’m releasing it now because I know that some of you want it, and because it provides a great opportunity for feedback and discussion.</p>

			<p>I have set up <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103500646933311549673/communities/113100743661844880533">a new Google+ community</a> where you can share your thoughts. As before, you can also <a href="mailto:jakob@tabletopsoftware.net">send an email</a> or <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rpg-ambience">post to the mailing list</a>.</p>

			<p>To try out RPG Ambience Soundboard, go to <a href="http://sound.rpg-ambience.com/">sound.rpg-ambience.com</a>.</p>
</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/soundboard-alpha</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Using color themes to establish a visual style</title>
		<id>/articles/color-themes</id>
		<updated>2015-12-05T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>When using visual ambience, color can be a surprisingly simple and effective way of creating a mood and establishing a consistent visual style for a location, a session, or even an entire campaign. Color has long been used by painters, cinematographers, and many other visual artists for exactly this purpose. Even without the time and expertise available to professionals in the field, you can use simple versions of this technique to make a noticeable impact on your game.</p>

			<h2>The impact of color</h2>
			<p>At its simplest, color can be used to associate a scene with a concept, or emphasize a concept that is already present. To name but two examples, blue can be used to signal that something is cold and artificial while green is commonly associated with either nature or toxicity. A distinct and well-known example of applying this technique to an entire film is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181865/"><cite>Traffic</cite></a>, where scenes taking place in the US are colored blue, while scenes taking place in Mexico are colored yellow.</p>

			<p>Whatever color you choose to associate with a given concept, the end result is that your plot and ambience will strengthen each other. When the characters are dealing with a concept, the color in your ambience will intensify the experience. Likewise, when you show an image, the players will anticipate events involving concepts that you have associated with that image’s color theme. This is similar to how <a href="/articles/emotional-music/">emotional music</a> can both create emotion where it’s needed and strengthen emotion that’s already present.</p>

			<h2>How to create a color theme</h2>
			<p>If you’re lucky, you have already found a collection of images from a single source that all share the same color theme. In most cases, however, your images will come from different places and won’t necessarily share a common theme. In these situations, you can use image manipulation software to enforce a color theme of your own.</p>

			<p>While the details and capabilities of specific software are beyond the scope of this post, a few general concepts are applicable essentially everywhere and can be used even without special training. Generally speaking, you will want to focus on options that allow you alter the hue, saturation, brightness/lightness, and contrast of an image. By tweaking these factors, you can decide how the color theme should look and how prominent it should be in a given image.</p>

			<h2>An example color theme</h2>
			<p>For a recent game inspired by material like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0444682/"><cite>The Reaping</cite></a> and the <cite>Swamp Fever</cite> scenario in <cite>Left 4 Dead 2</cite>, I had collected a fair amount of swamp-related artwork, but I didn’t feel that its tone matched what I wanted to convey. Overall, the images felt either too cold or too bright. Below is some of the original, unedited artwork that I wanted to use:</p>

			<figure class="wide-gallery"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nic-stage/3431481127"><img src="/media/swamp.jpg" alt="A swamp at dusk"/></a><!--
				--><a href="http://andreewallin.com/swamp-fever"><img src="/media/swamp-huts.jpg" alt="A group of huts in a swamp"/></a><!--
				--><a href="http://www.christopherallenwalters.com/corning/h71b55dc"><img src="/media/town-square.jpg" alt="A town square in autumn"/></a>
			</figure><p>I decided that I wanted to present a consistently warm and vivid feeling, but at the same time somewhat dim and sickly, even unnatural. In my mind, the type of swamp that I wanted to create was clearly yellow, so that’s the color that I choose. After a few filters and color adjustments, here’s what I came up with:</p>

			<figure class="wide-gallery"><img src="/media/swamp-yellow.jpg" alt="The same swamp as before with a yellow color theme"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/swamp-huts-yellow.jpg" alt="The same huts as before with a yellow color theme"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/town-square-yellow.jpg" alt="The same town square as before with a yellow color theme"/></figure><p>The first effect is that the coldness and brightness that I disliked has been reduced. The second is that the images now have much more consistent color palettes, making scene transitions less jarring and clearly conveying that the characters are still in the same general area.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/color-themes</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Why <cite>Fiasco</cite> playsets are a great innovation</title>
		<id>/articles/playsets</id>
		<updated>2015-08-23T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/transatlantic.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Fiasco playset Transatlantic"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/quest-for-the-golden-panda.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Fiasco playset Quest for the Golden Panda"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/dc73.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Fiasco playset DC73"/></figure><p>Most games with a GM, including <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> and other games in the same tradition, use adventure modules to provide the plot and setting for a gaming session. Conversely, most games without a GM use some form of collaborative improvisation for the same purpose. The GM-less game <cite>Fiasco</cite>, on the other hand, uses a hybrid of the two that in my mind is one of the greatest innovations in modern roleplaying: the playset.</p>

			<p>A playset is a set of four lists describing different aspects of a <cite>Fiasco</cite> scenario: relationships, needs, locations, and objects. Each list contains 36 items, for a total of 144 individual items. Players set up the plot and setting for a session by selecting items from the lists in a partially random, partially collaborative process. Once the setup is done, players have the starting point for the session, a sense of the story’s direction, and a general understanding of the setting. They are effectively a cross between adventure seeds and adventure modules, open enough to let players create their own story but detailed enough that players don’t have to come up with everything from scratch.</p>

			<p><cite>Fiasco</cite> became a runaway success on the indie roleplaying scene, most likely due to several combined factors. One of these, I’m confident, was its use of playsets.</p>

			<h2>The impact of playsets</h2>

			<p>Without playsets, <cite>Fiasco</cite> would still be an easy-to-learn, casual game that turns the definition of “winning” on its head—but many players would be at a loss as to how to actually get started playing it, since they would have no scenario to play. Playsets invite groups to start playing right away without worrying about all the details of plot and setting, and unlike the introductory adventures common in the rulebooks of other games, they don’t require lots of reading to prepare. Playsets very effectively achieve a middle ground between “lots of preparation” and “lots of improvisation” that inspires enough people to actually give the game a shot rather than just putting it on their to-play list.</p>

			<p>The fact that <cite>Fiasco</cite> playsets achieve this middle ground has a much more profound effect than it first may seem. Thanks to their compact format, each one clearly communicates a single genre, mood, and idea, making clear what it offers and very quickly conjuring up ideas in the player’s head about what kind of session it can provide. Unlike the library of any game using adventure modules, the library of <cite>Fiasco</cite> playsets can be casually browsed like an on-demand movie library, players can quickly select a playset that excites them, and a game can be started just as easily and quickly as pressing the play button.</p>

			<p>The end result of this is that <cite>Fiasco</cite> becomes a game that you both can and want to play often. While my own gaming group enjoys many games, both with and without GMs, <cite>Fiasco</cite> is by far the one that we have played the most. That’s not because we think <cite>Fiasco</cite> is much better than all of the other games, but rather because the playset format provides us with a conveniently packaged, guaranteed night of enjoyment, whether we have selected the playset a week in advance or don’t even have one in mind when we sit down at the table.</p>

			<h2>The future of playsets</h2>

			<p>I believe that the idea of playsets can successfully be applied to many other games, provided that they are adapted to match that game’s mechanics and setting. While playsets for a hypothetical <cite>Star Wars</cite> roleplaying game might not focus on needs and relationships, it is easy to imagine a list of iconic elements in the galaxy far, far away containing such things as asteroid field chases, unpaid debts, and exiled Jedi masters. <cite>Star Wars</cite> games already include these elements anyway, so putting them in playsets would free players from the burden of listing these ideas all on their own, while still allowing for a great deal of freedom in how to use them.</p>

			<p>Another exciting possibility is to “hack” playsets, taking one intended for <cite>Fiasco</cite> and using it in a different game. In a Cthulhu game, the players could use relationships and needs to flesh out their characters while the GM could use objects and locations as the basis for clues.</p>

			<p>Roleplaying games have traditionally been difficult to get into because they lack the “single night of fun” quality that can be found in other forms of entertainment, like video games and movies. I believe that playsets offer steps toward a solution to this, and hope to see more of them in the future of our hobby.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/playsets</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title><cite>Beyond Good &amp; Evil</cite> (science fiction)</title>
		<id>/music/beyond-good-and-evil</id>
		<updated>2015-08-15T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/beyond-good-and-evil.jpg" alt="Cover art for Beyond Good &amp; Evil"/></figure><p>The twelve year old multiplatform game <cite>Beyond Good &amp; Evil</cite> became a cult classic by taking familiar elements from many genres and twisting them just enough to create something unique, charming, and quirky. Its soundtrack, composed by Christophe Héral, skillfully does the same thing, making it a brilliant resource for a campaign that can accept the quirks and turn them into strengths.</p>

			<p>The calm tracks are largely piano-based and have a partially oriental feel. The mysterious tracks, based mainly on the caves and “dungeons” in the game, sound decidedly subterranean, even with echoes in some parts. The action tracks are more electronic than the rest of the soundtrack, and some of them mix in bestial noises meant to convey the alien nature of the “Dom+02:00” serving as the game’s antagonists—making these tracks especially important to fit into the specific campaign before using them. Finally, the distinct “Akuda House Propaganda” and “Fun and Mini-Games” tracks can be used to great effect provided you have complete player buy-in, as they represent <cite>Beyond Good &amp; Evil</cite> at its very quirkiest.</p>

			<p>Those with access to the actual audio tracks from the game, as opposed to the official soundtrack, can find some additional tracks as well as some tracks split into more files than on the soundtrack.</p>

			<h2>Suggested scenes</h2>

			<h3>Calm</h3>
			<ol><li value="3">Home Sweet Home</li>
				<li value="4">Hyllian Suite</li>
			</ol><h3>Mystery</h3>
			<ol><li value="7">Mineshaft Madness</li>
				<li value="11">Don’t Fear the Reaper</li>
				<li value="20">Heart of Darkness</li>
			</ol><h3>Stealth</h3>
			<ol><li value="23">Behind Enemy Lines</li>
			</ol><h3>Action</h3>
			<ol><li value="12">Fear the Reaper</li>
				<li value="19">Violent Jade Suite</li>
				<li value="24">Free Your Mind</li>
				<li value="29">In Hot Pursuit</li>
				<li value="30">Sins of the Father</li>
			</ol><h3>Epic action</h3>
			<ol><li value="2">Dancing with DomZ</li>
			</ol><h3>Emotional</h3>
			<ol><li value="25">Thoughtful Reflections</li>
			</ol><h3>Race</h3>
			<ol><li value="13">Fun and Mini-Games</li>
			</ol><h3>Bar</h3>
			<ol><li value="9">Fun and Mini-Games</li>
				<li value="14">Funky Bar 100</li>
			</ol></html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/music/beyond-good-and-evil</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Partial audio support on mobile browsers</title>
		<id>/articles/mobile-audio-support</id>
		<updated>2015-05-08T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>Due to a <a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297">significant browser restriction</a>, RPG Ambience has so far been unable to play audio on mobile browsers. I just updated <a href="http://app.rpg-ambience.com/">the app</a>, however, with a small fix that adds partial support for audio on mobile browsers. While basic playback works as intended, note that <em>this support is purely experimental</em> and there is a severe limitation: <em>only the first track in any given scene will play, and looping is not supported</em>.</p>

			<p>For <a href="/articles/next-version/">the next version of RPG Ambience</a>, I plan to remove this limitation. (I have a solution in mind, but it’s not as simple to implement as this experimental support.) I also intend to optimize the user interface so that it looks better on mobile devices, especially phones. Finally, I also hope to implement <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/64">network ambience</a>, to make mobile devices useful not only as standalone players but also as players in a multi-device setup.</p>

			<p>For now, partial audio support is the best thing available. If you use RPG Ambience primarily as a soundboard with one-shot sound effects, it might be enough for your purposes.</p>

			<p>If you have comments on this experimental feature, or on aspects of RPG Ambience in general, please <a href="mailto:rpg.ambience@gmail.com">send an email</a>, post to the <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rpg-ambience">Google Group</a>, or comment on <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues">GitHub</a>.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/mobile-audio-support</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>The design goals of RPG Ambience</title>
		<id>/articles/design-goals</id>
		<updated>2015-04-30T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>This blog post describes the design goals of RPG Ambience, primarily to shed some light on why I may or may not prioritize a given feature request. In order to understand the reasoning behind these goals, we need to take a brief look at the history of RPG Ambience and what came before it.</p>

			<p>I have used ambience in my games for roughly ten years. During this time, the ways in which I use ambience have changed significantly. When I started out, my only goal (and the only one easily achieved with the equipment I had at the time) was to loop background music during my games. After I first started developing RPG Ambience roughly five years ago<a href="#development-history">*</a>, I started using images in addition to music. Eventually, I began using one-shot images and sound effects in addition to background images and music. Currently, I’m exploring ways to add environmental soundscapes alongside this. In the future, as “intelligent home” technology becomes more affordable and easier to use, I plan on also controlling the lighting around the gaming table, along with other aspects of the gaming environment that can be hooked into a computer (as mentioned in a previous blog post on <a href="/articles/future/">ambience of the future</a>).</p>

			<p>Apart from finding the need for new features, I have also significantly varied how I structure my RPG Ambience adventures. For sessions based mainly on GM preparation, I have often used a smaller collection of one-shot scenes depicting specific locations or characters that the PCs come across. For sessions driven mostly or entirely by improvisation, my adventures have contained a larger number of scenes with much more generic content, intended more as a smörgåsbord than a script. For some sessions, whether due to lack of time or lack of need, my adventures have simply contained a single <a href="/articles/iconic-images/">iconic image</a> accompanied by music.</p>

			<p>What’s common to all of this is that my use of ambience has changed in ways that I couldn’t predict five years ago—and I’m just one user. When we take into account the diverse experiences of other people who have used RPG Ambience over the years, it becomes clear that finding a single “right way” of using ambience in games is not realistic. In order to stay relevant, software like RPG Ambience that wants to appeal to many different users and enable creativity must allow users to create their own workflows rather than dictating a single workflow for them.</p>

			<p>The design goal of RPG Ambience can thus be phrased as follows: <em>To provide users with tools for adding ambience to their games in the way that best suits them, giving up some simplicity in favor of flexibility.</em></p>

			<p>We can see a concrete example of what this design goal means in a common type of tabletop RPG software: character generators. The simplest character generators are those that work for a single ruleset, and only require users to fill in fields in a form. At the other extreme, the most flexible character generators are digital spreadsheets (such as Excel and OpenOffice) allowing users to define their own logic and constraints, making them suitable for any system and any house rule—but more complex. RPG Ambience is intended to be closer to the spreadsheet than the form: providing users with more freedom at the cost of some convenience.</p>

			<p>To be clear, for every given feature that is implemented, I will strive to make it as simple to use as possible. When I select what features to implement, however, I will not prioritize the simplest ones but rather those that will become the best building blocks for users to combine in whatever way best suits them.</p>

			<p class="footnote" id="development-history">* The first public version of RPG Ambience was published in 2011, but I had been developing prototypes for personal use before that.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/design-goals</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>What do you want to see in the next version of RPG Ambience?</title>
		<id>/articles/next-version</id>
		<updated>2015-04-16T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/logo.png" alt="The RPG Ambience logo"/></figure><p>I’m working on a new version of RPG Ambience, and I want your feedback to make it as good as possible!</p>

			<p>This blog post is a call for feedback from those of you who use RPG Ambience and want to see it improve in the future, as well as those of you who do not use RPG Ambience but would consider doing so if it had additional functionality. What features and changes do you want to see? Please provide your thoughts in any of the following ways:</p>

			<ul><li>Send an email to <a href="mailto:rpg.ambience@gmail.com">rpg.ambience@gmail.com</a>.</li>
				<li>Post to the <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rpg-ambience">RPG Ambience Google Group</a>.</li>
				<li>Create or comment on a <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues">GitHub issue</a>.</li>
			</ul><p>My own use of ambience has changed a lot over the past few years, and has now outgrown the current version of RPG Ambience. At the same time, I have received feedback and questions from users about good use cases that are currently difficult or impossible to put into practice within RPG Ambience. For those reasons, one of the upcoming features is <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/63">a redesign of the scene and layer concepts</a>, intended to make adventure design and playback in RPG Ambience both simpler and more flexible than it currently is. This will involve a few changes to the user interface, but the key concepts will stay mostly the same.</p>

			<p>In addition to these incremental changes, I have been working on designs for entirely new features, including <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/64">network ambience</a> (mentioned in <a href="/articles/future/">a previous blog post</a>) and <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/30">sequences</a> (or scripts, though not in the sense of programming).</p>

			<p>I might not be able to implement every feature request, in part because of time and resource constraints and in part because they might conflict with the <a href="/articles/design-goals/">design goals of RPG Ambience</a>, but I will consider all of them and gladly discuss them with you.</p>

			<p>I have not set a release date for this new version and will not set one, even an estimate, until I’m sure that I can follow through with it. Although my available time is limited by a full-time job, I regularly use RPG Ambience for my own games and have every interest in improving it when I can. Spending time getting the design right will make the ultimate implementation work much easier, and gathering feedback from you is part of this process.</p>

			<p>I look forward to hearing your comments!</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/next-version</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Conveying your game’s essence with an iconic image</title>
		<id>/articles/iconic-images</id>
		<updated>2015-02-15T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/fellowship-of-the-ring.jpg" alt="The Fellowship of the Ring"/></figure><p>Using images as ambience can be difficult. You might not find the right images, and you might not find enough of them, even when practising <a href="/articles/artwork-driven-adventures/">artwork-driven adventure design</a>. For these situations, using an <dfn>iconic image</dfn> can be the easiest and most effective way of including visual ambience in your game.</p>

			<p>An iconic image is one that in some way conveys the essence of your game and is suitable as your only visual ambience for an entire session. The image itself can be of almost anything, but it has to achieve one goal: putting your players in the game world and keeping them there whatever happens in the session.</p>

			<p>For a session centered around a single location, such as a city, an iconic image might be one of the location itself, depicting either the entire location or a prominent part of it. For a session focused on a specific concept, such as apocalypse, an iconic image might be one that conveys the concept’s mood without being tied to a particular place. For a session not bound to anything except a campaign setting, an iconic image might be abstract, such as a symbol (an example being the skull in <a href="/music/baldurs-gate"><cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite></a>). These guidelines are intentionally vague, because iconic images can take almost any form and can only be judged in the context of a specific game.</p>

			<p>An iconic image can function in two different ways. The first is to reinforce the group’s existing mental image of the game, making the ambience match the story being told. The other is to influence the group’s perception of the game, actually creating a mental image for the group rather than mirroring a pre-existing one. Many iconic images will do both to some degree.</p>

			<h2>An example iconic image</h2>
			<p>In a session centered around extraterrestrials and UFOs, the improvisational and collaborative nature of the game system prevented me from preparing specific images. I couldn’t make any assumptions about the setting or characters, but I did know that I wanted to convey the same mood as classic UFO stories like <cite>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</cite>, <cite>The X-Files</cite>, and urban legends: one of mystery, darkness, and uncertainty but not necessarily of fear or despair. I decided to use an iconic image for this purpose, and below is the one that I selected:</p>

			<figure><img src="/media/night.jpg" alt="A nighttime forest beneath a starry, glowing sky" class="wide"/></figure><p>The image sets the stage immediately by depicting nighttime. While not all scenes took place during night, it created an expectation that many of them would, and prompted us to match the <a href="/articles/physical-ambience/">physical ambience</a> of our daytime session as much as we could by turning off the lights and drawing the shades.</p>

			<p>While the glow in the sky is in reality either a meteorological phenomenon or a photo manipulation, it is easy to see how players could easily interpret it to be something extraterrestrial, if only subconsciously. Similarly, the remote location depicted brings to mind stories of alien abductions taking place in isolated areas, further emphasizing the game’s extraterrestrial focus. While the story started out in a city, we found that as it progressed, it gradually moved toward taking place in the location depicted in the image, even though nobody had required or even suggested that it should.</p>

			<p>While it may seem like an iconic image is an inferior replacement for a collection of images, this doesn’t have to be the case, as the example above hints. Using a single image can make your session more focused on a specific element, making the story more engaging during play and more memorable afterwards. It might be a lack of available material that prompts you to start using iconic images, but continuing to use them can become a artistic choice that you make even when you don’t have to.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/iconic-images</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>The problem with tabletop RPG software</title>
		<id>/articles/tabletop-rpg-software</id>
		<updated>2015-01-11T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>Tabletop RPG software is a troubled business, as evidenced by the failure of digital tools for <a href="https://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/dx20020607a">third</a> and <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?326233-WotC-s-D-amp-D-Virtual-Table-Cancelled">fourth</a> edition <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite>, the <a href="http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/digital_tools_announcement">cancellation of DungeonScape</a> for fifth edition <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite>, the <a href="http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2quvn?Still-Under-Development">current problems with Paizo Gamespace</a> for <cite>Pathfinder</cite>, and numerous other projects that either were delayed, failed, or never received funding to begin with.</p>

			<p>Part of this is because software development of any type is difficult, and even more so for companies whose primary experience is in publishing. Even when projects successfully ship, however, there is a hugely important factor that can cause them to still fail. This potentially gamebreaking factor is one of the distinguishing features of the hobby: house rules.</p>

			<h2>The problem</h2>
			<p>To put it simply, the presence of house rules in tabletop RPGs, and the fact that practically every gaming group uses their very own set of such rules, means that software has to allow players to add their own house rules in order to be useful—but actually doing so is an impossibly complex task.</p>

			<p>Remember that house rules are not just about inserting new game elements that mostly mimic existing elements, such as adding a new skill to <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite>. They are also about altering the core rules of the game, such as adding completely new mechanics for spell preparation. Handling this type of house rule is a much more involved process than simply allowing the player to enter a skill name into a text field.</p>

			<p>This problem is apparent even for minor changes, such as adding action points to a system that doesn’t have it. A change like this would require new domain logic, new interface elements, new storage formats, and any number of other significant changes to the software.</p>

			<p>That being said, we could include all types of house rules if we added support for our software to perform arbitrary logic based on requirements specified by humans. There’s something odd about that feature, though: it’s the very definition of programming! In other words, adding true support for house rules effectively requires us to add a scripting language to our software—and doing so would automatically exclude the vast majority of players, in the same way that all software requiring programming knowledge excludes most users. The only way around this would be to invent a form of programming that doesn’t require users to spend dozens of hours learning to program in any conventional sense. That’s a noble goal, but utterly unrealistic to achieve for a small project in a niche market.</p>

			<p>Given that we cannot realistically add support for arbitrary house rules, we inevitably get a mismatch between the software’s rules and the gaming group’s rules. For every house rule that a group uses, the mismatch increases. When it becomes too large, the software is effectively useless. Even before that, the mismatch can make the software tedious and difficult to use, as the user constantly has to work against the software rather than with it. An analogy is using a word processor for graphical design: it can be used to create layouts but usually in a convoluted way, and some layouts cannot be created at all.</p>

			<p>In essence, the problem is this: Every time the players use different rules than the software, the software becomes an obstacle. Since we know that practically all players will use house rules, we also know that the software will become an obstacle to practically all players, to varying degrees. At best, the software is only useful sometimes. At worst, the software is never really useful at all.</p>

			<h2>The solution</h2>
			<p>If we take a step back, however, we realize that house rules are only a problem when they conflict with the software’s rules. The solution is almost embarrassingly simple: not putting rules in the software to begin with!</p>

			<p>By keeping rules out of our software as much as possible, we free ourselves to focus on software that supports various aspects of the game rather than dictating how the game itself should be played. Great examples of this include:</p>

			<ul><li>Virtual tabletops that only deal with positioning and other generic mechanics.</li>
				<li>Campaign management software that allows players to describe and organize whatever information is relevant to their game.</li>
				<li>Randomizers such as name, city, or plot generators.</li>
			</ul><p>Due to demand, we will continue to see rules-heavy applications in the tabletop RPG world, a notable example being character generators. While some of these will be successful, they will always struggle with the problem of house rules. Rules-light software, on the other hand, will continue to thrive without having to worry about house rules, and will potentially be around for decades, enjoyed by roleplayers of any system and any edition.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/tabletop-rpg-software</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title><cite>Tabletop Audio</cite></title>
		<id>/music/tabletop-audio</id>
		<updated>2014-11-25T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><a href="http://tabletopaudio.com/"><img src="/media/tabletop-audio.jpg" alt="The logo of Tabletop Audio"/></a>
			</figure><p><a href="http://tabletopaudio.com/"><cite>Tabletop Audio</cite></a> is a large and growing collection of free ambience audio for roleplaying games. While some of it contains music, the focus is squarely on environmental sounds. Each track is ten minutes long, which is usually enough to hide obvious looping. The sounds themselves are of high quality.</p>

			<p>While the <cite>Tabletop Audio</cite> website provides an audio player that can be used directly in the browser, it also offers the audio files for download, making them easy to use in other applications as well.</p>

			<p><cite>Tabletop Audio</cite> is offered as a cost-free and ad-free service. The creator accepts voluntary donations <a href="http://www.patreon.com/tabletopaudio">on Patreon</a>.</p>

			<h2>Suggested scenes</h2>
			<p>Each track in <cite>Tabletop Audio</cite> is a complete scene in itself, although those without music can be successfully complemented with music of your own.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/music/tabletop-audio</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Pitfalls of using ambience</title>
		<id>/articles/pitfalls</id>
		<updated>2014-11-02T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>While this blog clearly encourages the use of ambience in roleplaying games, some groups might find that ambience is not for them. What follows is a list of problems that you might run into when using ambience, as well as a few suggestions for how they might be avoided.</p>

			<h2>Technology</h2>
			<ul><li>You always need to have a computer available, as well as speakers and/or a monitor.</li>
				<li>Malfunctions, depleted batteries, and power outages can cause your setup to fail.</li>
				<li>If you use visuals, you need to reserve space for a monitor around the gaming table—possibly an entire side.</li>
				<li>If you use sound, you need to play in a calm area where you can hear the sound without disturbing others.</li>
				<li>Players who cannot accommodate for any of the above points might become less eager to offer their homes as gaming areas.</li>
			</ul><h2>Possible solutions</h2>
			<ul><li>Avoid conveying crucial information through your ambience, so that you can play without it if necessary.</li>
			</ul><h2>Distractions</h2>
			<ul><li>Players might feel that sound or visuals distracts them from the game itself.</li>
				<li>Gamemasters might feel that having to control sound and visuals distracts them too much from other aspects of the game.</li>
			</ul><h2>Possible solutions</h2>
			<ul><li>Keep the volume low, so that your sound does not distract during conversations but still conveys a mood when there is less talking.</li>
				<li>Keep the number of scenes low, so that you have fewer decisions to make and fewer things to remember during play.</li>
				<li>If none of your ambience contains spoilers, ask one of your players to control it for you.</li>
			</ul><h2>Preparation</h2>
			<ul><li>Visuals and sound suitable for your game might be difficult to find, even when you have a lot of time to search for it.</li>
				<li>Learning how to use your software and creating ambience in it might take more time out of your preparation than you are willing to spend.</li>
			</ul><h2>Possible solutions</h2>
			<ul><li>Make use of <a href="/articles/artwork-driven-adventures/">artwork-driven adventure design</a> to make your search for images and sound easier.</li>
				<li>Ask your players to create ambience for you, possibly leaving empty slots where you can insert secret content.</li>
			</ul></html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/pitfalls</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Making use of physical ambience</title>
		<id>/articles/physical-ambience</id>
		<updated>2014-06-30T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>This blog focuses on digital ambience: sound and visuals created by computers. No matter how and where we play our games, however, digital ambience does not exist in a vacuum; it always interacts with physical ambience: sounds, visuals, and other sensations from the physical world around us.</p>

			<p>Physical ambience comes in many different forms, whether natural or man-made. It includes lighting, temperature, weather, noise, and everything else in the environment around the gaming table.</p>

			<p>There are at least two significant ways to use physical ambience in your games: as a complement to your digital ambience, or as a contrast to it.</p>

			<p>The goal of using physical ambience as a complement is to match it as closely as possible with the digital ambience in order to amplify the experience. As an example, consider an adventure set in a warm, bright jungle. In this scenario, physical ambience in the form of heat and sunshine can immerse the players in the story in a way that digital ambience can’t.</p>

			<p>The goal of using physical ambience as a contrast is also to amplify the experience, but in the opposite way: by having it differ sharply from the digital ambience. As an example, consider the same jungle adventure described above being played on a cold winter’s day. When the snow is falling outside, just seeing images of a sweltering jungle can be enough to make the players feel warmer inside and ready to pretend for a few hours that they are in a different place.</p>

			<p>While physical ambience can be a powerful tool to use, it should be noted that it’s also difficult to wield, since much of it cannot be controlled. Unless you live in a place with a very homogeneous, predictable climate, factors like sunshine and temperature can easily ruin all of your plans. In some cases, such as a sudden downpour, you might be able to integrate this unpredictability into your game by having it also rain in-universe. In the worst case, it means that you cannot make any assumptions whatsoever about your physical ambience.</p>

			<p>Although the unpredictability of physical ambience makes it difficult to include in your planning, simply being aware of its potential can give you ideas on how to improve the gaming experience when the physical ambience does turn out in your favor. For instance, if the weather turns out to match out your jungle adventure, you can capitalize on this when the characters go down into the mysterious ruins, by closing the curtains to recreate the darkness below and opening a window to simulate a cool breeze.</p>

			<p><a href="/articles/future/">In the future</a>, we might have better tools for integrating physical ambience into our games. Until then, simply keeping it in the back of your head can provide opportunities for unique and memorable sessions that go beyond the limitations of digital ambience.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/physical-ambience</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Comparing the official <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> soundtracks</title>
		<id>/articles/dnd-soundtracks</id>
		<updated>2014-05-17T10:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/midnight-syndicate-dungeons-and-dragons.jpg" alt="The cover of Dungeons &amp; Dragons by Midnight Syndicate"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/sharn-city-of-towers.jpg" alt="The cover of Sharn: City of Towers, which included the Shards of Eberron soundtrack by David P. Davidson"/></figure><p>Although Wizards of the Coast have been reluctant to promote technology as part of the official <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> experience—in part due to failed projects in the past—they have understood the potential of a great soundtrack.</p>

			<p>Two official <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> soundtracks have been released, both in the 3rd edition era: <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> by Midnight Syndicate in 2003 and <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite> by David P. Davidson in 2004. Although released only one year apart, they clearly illustrate two fundamentally different approaches to creating soundtracks for gaming.</p>

			<p><cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> by Midnight Syndicate is intended as a form of official, general-purpose soundtrack that captures the essence of the eponymous game on one CD. <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite> by David P. Davidson, on the other hand, is meant to specifically bring the campaign world of Eberron to life, and was released together with the supplement <cite>Sharn: City of Towers</cite>.</p>

			<p>The most immediate difference between the two soundtracks is their instrumentation. <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> consists mostly, if not entirely, of digital instruments used to recreate the feeling of a traditional orchestra. <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite>, on the other hand, was recorded by an actual orchestra, yielding what the promotional material accurately describes as “cinema-quality” music. While Midnight Syndicate handle their tools well, most would agree that a real orchestra carries more weight and generally sounds more interesting than a digital equivalent.</p>

			<p>This brings us to another significant difference between the two soundtracks: their musical structure. In the same way that the orchestra in <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite> provides the more interesting sound, its tracks have a varied, unpredictable structure, just as the tracks in most movie scores. By contrast, the tracks in <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> are generally uniform and predictable, similar to the scores of most video games. This difference is even implied by the number of tracks and their lengths: <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> contains 24 tracks, most of which are less than four minutes long, whereas <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite> contains only 8 tracks, all but one of which are more than four minutes long.</p>

			<p>The differences described above already hint at how these two soundtracks can be used, and which contexts they are appropriate for.</p>

			<p><cite>Shards of Eberron</cite>, with its genuinely orchestral sound and dynamic structure, can evoke a unique mood and very accurately convey the exact feeling that the composer wanted to convey. On the other hand, the lack of uniformity within each track makes them difficult to drop into a gaming session, where being able to enforce the same mood throughout a scene is often important. For these reasons, <cite>Shards of Eberron</cite> is most effective outside of games, perhaps when pitching the campaign setting to your gaming group, or as inspirational background music while you are planning an adventure.</p>

			<p>Conversely, <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite>, with its large selection of shorter, more focused tracks, is most effective during gaming sessions. Each track clearly conveys a specific mood, and hearing them in the background of an immersive game makes the lack of a real orchestra less noticeable. While it may not have the same potential to uniquely connect your group to the setting, its pragmatic design makes it a valuable resource nonetheless.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/dnd-soundtracks</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Solving group problems without expelling players</title>
		<id>/articles/group-problems</id>
		<updated>2014-05-08T10:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>The <a href="http://blog.obsidianportal.com/player-wealth-custom-dice-spinelessly-ending-campaign/">latest episode of the Haste podcast</a> discusses various ways of handling problematic players and bad group dynamics. They suggest using a “spineless” method, such as letting a campaign fizzle out and quietly starting a new one with only part of the original group. This is contrasted with “spineful” methods, such as discussing the problems with the group and possibly expelling problematic players in-person. The spineful methods are held up as “the right way” but also pointed out as being too difficult for most gamemasters to actually implement.</p>

			<p>Without going into the debate on spineless versus spineful approaches to dealing with these problems, I will suggest another approach that can be attempted both with and without a spine: changing systems. If the problems in your group are caused by otherwise well-meaning players who do things that go against the spirit of the game, they might be solved by moving to a game with a different spirit.</p>

			<p>As an example, consider a player who loves to instigate in-game events, such as stealing from important NPCs or setting off blatant traps. This type of behavior isn’t necessarily a sign of a bad friend or a bad player (in fact, 4th edition <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> lists the “instigator” as one of the major player types), but it can still cause trouble for a group playing a traditional game of heroic fantasy.</p>

			<p>Now consider switching from <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite> to <a href="http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/"><cite>Fiasco</cite></a>. The instigator will feel right at home without causing trouble for the other players, since <cite>Fiasco</cite> is game where such behavior does not interfere with the game and is in fact encouraged. If the rest of the group enjoys the new game as well, that’s a win-win situation for everybody involved.</p>

			<p>An entire category of games that can solve some of these problems is GM-less games (of which <cite>Fiasco</cite> is one). Because these games actively involve all players at the table in the storytelling, and because there is no single authority figure to argue with, the game is more likely to be driven by discussion and consensus rather than individual decisions. When everybody participates on equal footing, players are also more likely to object to disruptive behavior, since there is no gamemaster that is expected to do it for them.</p>

			<p>Yet another example of a game that can help a struggling group is <cite>Paranoia</cite>, which is mentioned in <a href="http://rpg.stackexchange.com/a/37062/2218">a recent RPG Stack Exchange question</a> touching on the same topic. In essence, <cite>Paranoia</cite> might be able to save a group that suffers from a lot of PC infighting, simply because <cite>Paranoia</cite> is a game where such behavior is expected.</p>

			<p>All of that being said, I will point out that this advice assumes that all the players do indeed want to play a fun game together. If one or more players actively want to sabotage the game, then all bets are off, and changing systems are unlikely to make matters better.</p>

			<p>If you are all on the same page, however, you might find that the philosophies of your chosen system are incompatible with your group dynamics and prevent you from truly enjoying the experience. With so many vastly different RPGs available, you have every reason and opportunity to pick one that matches your group’s dynamics.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/group-problems</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Ambience of the future</title>
		<id>/articles/future</id>
		<updated>2014-04-15T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>In keeping with the current trend of hyping futuristic technology, this post speculates on the ways in which ambience will be used around gaming tables in the future, some of them more realistic than others.</p>

			<h2>Distributed ambience</h2>
			<p>With sound and visuals spread out over all of the computers in a home, the entire gaming room can come alive. In a horror scenario, players can literally hear scary noises from the basement. If all players hook up their smartphones and tablets, combat sounds and spell effects caused by a character can originate from the physical location of that character’s player.</p>

			<p>There is even more potential when going beyond mere speakers and monitors. If the room’s lighting is connected to the system, the entire room can go dark when the characters enter a dungeon, or be flooded with red light when they find themselves on the elemental plane of fire. Air conditioning and fans can be controlled to create weather effects, activating senses other than just sight and hearing.</p>

			<h2>Augmented ambience</h2>
			<p>With augmented reality technology, like that provided by advanced glasses, monitors, and projectors, the imaginary world can mix with the physical world around the gaming table. When roleplaying different characters, the players can put on virtual masks, turning into soldiers, elves, aliens, or anything else. In futuristic settings like Shadowrun, the augmentations can reflect what the characters are seeing, even integrating game mechanics to make the information both immersive and practical.</p>

			<h2>Intelligent ambience</h2>
			<p>With highly sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, 3D-rendered artwork and synthesized orchestral music can be generated dynamically based on voice commands by the players and analysis of the story being told around the table. Ambience can be used with no preparation at all, creating a unique experience every time.</p>

			<h2>Virtual ambience</h2>
			<p>Combining all of the above into one futuristic whole, ambience effectively turns into a virtual reality environment that players experience together with their friends, in part dynamically generated and in part controlled by the players. If this is ultimately made possible, the inevitable question becomes: Are we still playing a tabletop roleplaying game?</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/future</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Using ambience to create campaign continuity</title>
		<id>/articles/continuity</id>
		<updated>2014-03-09T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>When coming up with ways to make a roleplaying game more immersive with music and visuals, movies often provide many ideas. Much of the time, however, a roleplaying game is actually closer to a TV series: both consist of adventures (or episodes) that are part of a longer campaign (or season). As such, TV series can provide ideas on how to use music and visuals to not only heighten immersion, but also to create continuity in a campaign.</p>

			<p>Below are two ways of doing so, with examples taken from a <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> campaign set in the post-war 1940s United States.</p>

			<h2>Opening sequences</h2>
			<p>There are countless examples of great opening sequences from TV shows that immediately place the viewer in the show’s setting. Notable ones include <cite>The X-Files</cite>, <cite>Firefly</cite>, and <cite>The Simpsons</cite>. Perhaps the most famous opening sequence of all time is the <cite>Star Wars</cite> opening crawl, which is actually from a movie—but it’s not a coincidence that the movie in question is part of a series.</p>

			<p>An immersive opening sequence can be the single best way of getting players back into the campaign world after a week or more of not playing. It is also a part of the session where you can be sure that all players are listening closely, which enables you to weave threads through the campaign and emphasize important concepts that you want the players to pick up on.</p>

			<p>At the start of every adventure in my <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> campaign, a short opening sequence was played: white letters fading into view on a black background, accompanied by ominous music and narration foreshadowing events to come. The same music, font, and narrative style was used for every such sequence, clearly signaling at the start of an adventure that the players would now enter the world of Cthulhu for the next few hours.</p>

			<p>On occasion, you can carefully break the continuity provided by an opening sequence in order to surprise the players or set the stage for particularly important adventures. While the opening sequence in my <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> campaign usually contained the same music, I intentionally changed it during the campaign finale to something more dramatic, foreshadowing the crucial events to come. An example of this from TV is <cite>The X-Files</cite>, where certain episodes subtly replaced the famous opening line “The truth is out there” with something tied to that specific episode.</p>

			<h2>Musical themes</h2>
			<p>Musical themes (or <i lang="de">leitmotifs</i>) can be a source of continuity for a campaign. While they are closely associated with opening sequences, there are many other ways of using them. An example of a soundtrack that weaves a theme through many different tracks is that of <a href="/music/baldurs-gate/"><cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite></a>, which has the potential to uniquely connect a campaign to the Forgotten Realms.</p>

			<p>Epic adventure movies like <cite>Star Wars</cite>, <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite>, and <cite>Pirates of the Caribbean</cite> provide many ideas on how to use musical themes to tie different parts of the series together. In movies like these, they are frequently tied to specific characters, locations, and concepts. Introducing a villain with intimidating music is effectful enough, but announcing his appearance in subsequent adventures with the same music has even more of an impact. Eventually, merely playing the music will make your players think of the villain, whether he has appeared or not.</p>

			<p>For campaigns set in the real world, popular music from that period and region can be used to place the players in the setting without having to spell out when and where the adventure takes place. In my <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> campaign, each session featured music by artists like the Rat Pack and Count Basie. These songs, while technically somewhat anachronistic, reminded the players of the setting’s time period in a more effective way than narration alone.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/continuity</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Making a soundtrack your own</title>
		<id>/articles/soundtrack-ownership</id>
		<updated>2014-02-15T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/among-thieves.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Uncharted: Among Thieves soundtrack"/></figure><p>Even though I love pulp adventure stories, I have never played a game in the <cite>Uncharted</cite> series. At a friend’s recommendation, however, I decided to use one of its soundtracks for a <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> adventure taking place in Tibet.</p>

			<p>To my friend, hearing the soundtrack no doubt reminded him of the game. To me, however, the soundtrack was something else entirely. To me, the soundtrack was as integral to the adventure as the plot, the locations, and the characters. As far as I was concerned, the soundtrack had been composed specifically for the adventure. For all intents and purposes, I had made the soundtrack my own, and my mind is drawn to the adventure whenever I listen to it.</p>

			<p>To me, track 2, “The City’s Secret”, is the ominous introduction to the adventure, with its exotic sound placing us in the mountains of Tibet. The first half of track 15, “The Gates of Shambhala”, describes the heroes making their surreal, taxing ascent to the top of the mountain. The second half of the same track conveys the danger and urgency of the mountaintop collapsing in on the hidden city and the heroes. Track 4, “Reunion”, signals that the terror is over, and that the heroes have finally uncovered and survived the truth that they were searching for.</p>

			<p>Anybody who did not take part in the adventure will not gather much about it from this description, but could still enjoy the soundtrack in its own right. Likewise, the entire adventure could have been played without music and still yield great memories of a captivating story.</p>

			<p>To those who took part in the adventure and made the soundtrack their own, however, the two become inseperable. When music used in this way, it becomes more than just a way of adding emotion and heightening the immersion—it becomes a part of the story itself.</p>

			<h2>How to make a soundtrack your own</h2>
			<p>Making a soundtrack your own is not a goal in itself, but rather a side effect of skillfully using music during a session. Even then, the way in which you select your soundtracks can affect the likelihood of you making it your own.</p>

			<p>Without a doubt, the soundtracks that are easiest to make your own are those that nobody in your group has heard before. When you are given a clean slate, you have every chance to associate them with any element of your game. A surprisingly good source for such music is mediocre and even plain bad movies and video games, which frequently have soundtracks that are much better than the rest of the movie or game.</p>

			<p>That being said, you should also consider the possibility of taking something less obscure and making it your own. When a soundtrack is used well and ties into the story being told, even familiar music can get a new identity. Despite being a big fan of the Rat Pack, I have successfully transformed several of their songs into the opening themes to some of my adventures, associating them primarily with those adventures even today.</p>

			<p>Unlike the art that you select in <a href="/articles/artwork-driven-adventures/">artwork-driven adventure design</a>, a soundtrack doesn’t have to dictate the plot in order for you to make it your own; when I selected the soundtrack for my <cite>Trail of Cthulhu</cite> adventure, for instance, the story elements of the adventure were already decided. The two concepts are closely related, though, and using either or both of them can blur the boundaries between roleplaying games and other forms of entertainment.</p>

			<p>Successfully making a soundtrack your own is a great outcome of a session, and one that you should embrace when it occurs. If I ever do play an <cite>Uncharted</cite> game, it’s quite likely that my instinctive reaction to hearing the soundtrack will be: “Hey, they stole that from my game!”</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/soundtrack-ownership</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title><cite>Jedi Outcast</cite> and <cite>Jedi Academy</cite> (<cite>Star Wars</cite>)</title>
		<id>/music/jedi-outcast-and-jedi-academy</id>
		<updated>2014-01-26T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/jedi-outcast.png" alt="Jedi Outcast video game icon"/><!--
				--><img src="/media/jedi-academy.png" alt="Jedi Academy video game icon"/></figure><p>Music is crucial to the <cite>Star Wars</cite> experience. With the most recognizable opening theme of all time, it grabs the audience’s attention from the very first moment—whether that audience is in a movie theater or at a gaming table.</p>

			<p>When trying to find music for your <cite>Star Wars</cite> game, the solution might seem obvious: Use the official movie soundtracks. Many of the tracks, however, are quite long and varied in both tempo and mood, making them less than optimal for gaming unless you are prepared to do some editing.</p>

			<p>Luckily, the developers of the <cite>Star Wars</cite> video games <cite>Jedi Outcast</cite> and <cite>Jedi Academy</cite> faced the same problem and did all that editing, making things a lot easier for the rest of us. The soundtracks to these games consist entirely of sections from the movie soundtracks joined together into virtually seamless remixes tailored for use during gameplay.</p>

			<h2>How to access the music</h2>

			<p>Unlike a lot of video games, <cite>Jedi Outcast</cite> and <cite>Jedi Academy</cite> store their music in a format that is easy to extract and make use of. While this blog normally focuses on how to use music rather than how to obtain it, the sheer value of these two soundtracks is enough to make an exception. In order to access the music, follow these instructions:</p>

			<ol><li>Insert your <cite>Jedi Outcast</cite> disc, or <cite>Jedi Academy</cite> disc one.</li>
				<li>On the disc, navigate to <code>GameData &gt; GameData &gt; base</code>.</li>
				<li>Open the file <code>assets0.pk3</code> in a file archiver, such as <a href="http://www.7-zip.org/">7-Zip</a>.</li>
				<li>Extract the contents of <code>music</code> to your hard drive.</li>
			</ol><p>At this point, you have full access to all of the MP3s used in the games.</p>

			<p>Note that <cite>Jedi Outcast</cite> and <cite>Jedi Academy</cite> do not contain exactly the same tracks, so extract the music from both of them if you want the complete collection.</p>

			<h2>Suggested scenes</h2>

			<h3>Theme</h3>
			<ul><li>cinematic_1.mp3</li>
				<li>endcredits.mp3</li>
			</ul><h3>Exploration</h3>
			<ul><li>Any track ending in <code>_explore</code></li>
			</ul><h3>Action</h3>
			<ul><li>Any track ending in <code>_action</code></li>
			</ul><h3>Chase</h3>
			<ul><li><code>rail_nowhere.mp3</code>, in the <code>t1_rail</code> folder from <cite>Jedi Academy</cite></li>
			</ul></html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/music/jedi-outcast-and-jedi-academy</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>The status of RPG Ambience in 2014</title>
		<id>/articles/2014-status</id>
		<updated>2014-01-19T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/logo.png" alt="The RPG Ambience logo"/></figure><p>At this point, RPG Ambience is fairly complete for the features that it offers. While there are several tweaks to be made to the current version, it is fully functional; I’ve used the current set of features in all of my games for the last few months without major problems.</p>

			<p>Even then, there are features planned that haven’t yet been implemented, such as <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/30">scripting</a> and <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/31">animations</a>. At this point, further development of RPG Ambience will be unpredictable and likely slow because I’m both working and writing my master’s thesis this semester. In all likelihood, this means that major tweaks or new features will be on hold for at least half a year.</p>

			<p>That being said, some development is still possible. In particular, smaller changes or additions that are of considerable value could be added, especially if specific requests are made. An example of such a feature is <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues/38">crossfading</a>, which was requested by a user and eventually implemented with relatively little work. If you have suggestions for features like this that would make RPG Ambience more valuable to you, do not hesitate to <a href="rpg.ambience@gmail.com">send an email</a> or <a href="https://github.com/JakobKallin/RPG-Ambience/issues">post an issue</a>.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/2014-status</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Artwork-driven adventure design</title>
		<id>/articles/artwork-driven-adventures</id>
		<updated>2014-01-05T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>There is widespread sentiment in the creative community that a great work of art must come from the artist’s own imagination. While homages and allusions to other art are accepted and often appreciated, blatant plagiarism is universally rejected.</p>

			<p>The world of roleplaying games, even though it’s a highly creative field, differs from other art in two important ways: its primary goal is entertainment, and the audience of a single adventure generally only consists of a single gaming group. These facts provide roleplayers with an immense benefit: Plagiarism is no problem at all, as long as it enhances the game.</p>

			<p>This is not a new sentiment; in fact, it’s spelled out clearly in the world’s most iconic roleplaying game, <cite>Dungeons &amp; Dragons</cite>: <q cite="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/product.aspx?x=dnd/products/dndacc/217507200" title="Quote by Andrew Finch on page 133 of the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide">The DM’s job is to entertain, not to be original.</q> For those who enhance their sessions with music and visuals, it opens up an entirely new world of possibilities. One such possibility is what I call artwork-driven adventure design.</p>

			<p>To put it simply, artwork-driven adventure design means creating an adventure based on artwork that you have already found, rather than trying to find suitable artwork for an adventure that you have already created. In other words, you conjure up an entire adventure based on inspiring pictures and music tracks. Since the adventure is based on the artwork, they will mesh perfectly and appear as if they were made for each other.</p>

			<p>For instance, let’s say that you find this digital painting of a wizard’s library by Shuxing Li:</p>

			<figure><img src="/media/mage-library.jpg" alt="Painting of a wizard’s library"/></figure><p>If you are looking for artwork to depict a generic library, this is far too specific. Similarly, if you have already created an adventure centered around a wizard’s library, the details in this painting probably don’t match what you have come up with on your own. If you let the artwork shape your adventure, however, it easily becomes a perfect match.</p>

			<p>Even after you have “stolen” the painting and incorporated it into your adventure, you’ll find that it immediately asks for new ideas in return. What is that sphere in the middle of the hallway? Why are there cobwebs all over the place and a skull on the floor? Where does the stairway lead?</p>

			<p>When you answer these questions, you are letting the artwork drive your adventure design. If you do it right, the story will be just as captivating as anything else you create—but the players will now also marvel at sound and visuals that perfectly match the story that you are telling.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/artwork-driven-adventures</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title><cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite> (fantasy)</title>
		<id>/music/baldurs-gate</id>
		<updated>2013-11-21T19:00:00+01:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/baldurs-gate.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Baldur’s Gate soundtrack"/></figure><p>It’s impossible for me to be impartial when reviewing the soundtrack that first got me started using music in tabletop roleplaying games. Luckily, a blog like this does not have to adhere to any sort of journalistic standards, so what follows is my completely biased recommendation of the <cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite> soundtrack.</p>

			<p>To many video gamers, <cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite> remains the gold standard against which all other RPG video games are measured. The same could be said of its soundtrack. While many soundtracks that came after it, including that of the sequel <cite>Shadows of Amn</cite>, may well be more interesting from a purely artistic point of view, few soundtracks are as immediately useful to tabletop roleplayers as this one.</p>

			<p>The tracklist covers almost every common theme that a typical fantasy campaign will need. Most tracks have titles that clearly communicate their mood and tempo, and nearly all of them are uniform enough to be useful without editing.</p>

			<p>Although not apparent at first, a leitmotif for the entire game recurs in several tracks, both calm and dramatic. To players who spent a lot of time with <cite>Baldur’s Gate</cite>, this melody provides a unique connection to the Forgotten Realms and the Sword Coast in particular, which could be either a great benefit or a drawback depending on which type of game you are running. To players who don’t recognize the theme to begin with but pick it up during your sessions, it may well become a trademark theme that they will forever associate with your campaign.</p>

			<h2>Suggested scenes</h2>

			<h3>Theme</h3>
			<ol><li value="1">Main Theme</li>
				<li value="2">Setting the Stage</li>
			</ol><h3>Battle</h3>
			<ol><li value="4">Attacked By Assassins</li>
				<li value="6">Gorion’s Battle</li>
				<li value="8">Hobgoblins and Worgs</li>
				<li value="10">The Gibberling Horde</li>
				<li value="13">Swords Against Darkness</li>
				<li value="16">Attacked By Bounty Hunters</li>
				<li value="18">Giant Spiders</li>
				<li value="20">From Out of the Storm</li>
				<li value="24">Bandit Melee</li>
				<li value="30">Fighting For Survival</li>
				<li value="32">The Last Battle</li>
			</ol><h3>Nature</h3>
			<ol><li value="7">Exploring the Plains</li>
				<li value="17">Cloakwood Forest</li>
			</ol><h3>Urban</h3>
			<ol><li value="3">Candelkeep</li>
				<li value="14">Safe In Beregost</li>
				<li value="21">The Friendly Arms Inn</li>
				<li value="26">Streets of the City</li>
			</ol><h3>Night</h3>
			<ol><li value="9">Night On the Plains</li>
				<li value="15">The Beregost Night</li>
				<li value="19">Night In Cloakwood</li>
				<li value="23">Stealth In the Bandit Camp</li>
				<li value="27">Night Falls On Baldur’s Gate</li>
			</ol><h3>Dungeon</h3>
			<ol><li value="12">The Ruins of Ulcaster</li>
				<li value="29">Down To the Sewers</li>
				<li value="31">Ever Deeper</li>
			</ol><h3>Temple</h3>
			<ol><li value="11">Helm’s Temple</li>
				<li value="28">The Lady’s House</li>
			</ol><h3>Emotional</h3>
			<ol><li value="5">Leaving Home</li>
			</ol></html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/music/baldurs-gate</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Using emotional music to make an impact</title>
		<id>/articles/emotional-music</id>
		<updated>2013-10-26T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/binary-sunset.jpg" alt="The “Binary Sunset” scene in Star Wars: A New Hope" class="wide"/></figure><p>As roleplayers, we are used to adventures that focus on violent conflict and stressful situations. Movies and books, however, generally put much more emphasis on human emotion than traditional roleplaying games. Even adventure movies like <cite>Star Wars</cite> devote entire scenes to the thoughts and feelings of the characters. Gamemasters who want to incorporate the same type of scenes in their games can benefit immensely from emotional music.</p>

			<p>In this context, emotional music refers to the type of music that plays in a movie or game when the characters’ feelings, rather than their actions, are in focus. These feelings can be anything from sadness and despair to love and relief. Two common traits of such music are a lower tempo and the use of certain instruments like the violin and the piano. Notable examples include “Binary Sunset” from <cite>Star Wars: A New Hope</cite> and the opening theme to <cite>The Rock</cite>.</p>

			<p>Emotional music requires special attention because emotional scenes, as mentioned earlier, are an unexpected part of adventures for many roleplayers. Merely describing an emotional situation is not guaranteed to evoke emotion among the players in the way that simply rolling for initiative will evoke an instinctive feeling of excitement. Likewise, merely playing emotional music will not necessarily have the same effect as playing action music. In a game where emotional scenes are rare, the combination of emotional narration and emotional music can be crucial in properly setting the mood.</p>

			<p>A good example is a recent session of <cite>Fiasco</cite>, which primarily consisted of action scenes interspersed with dialogue and investigation. In <cite>Fiasco</cite>, which embraces dark humor, players often react to tragic fates with indifference or even amusement. This is especially true in the very last montage scene of a session, where characters usually face disaster and tragedy of some sort. For this particular session, however, I had decided to experiment with my usual repertoire of calm, suspenseful, and stressful music by adding emotional music to the mix.</p>

			<p>When the time came for the characters to meet their grim ends, we started the emotional music—and something changed. Instead of simply thinking that the characters got what they deserved or even being amused by their failure, we found ourselves feeling sympathy for them—even for those who were clearly villains in the story. If this is the level of emotion that can be achieved in a morally ambiguous setting like <cite>Fiasco</cite>, it is easy to imagine how powerful emotional music can be in the epic tales of good and evil that are common in other roleplaying games.</p>

			<p>Apart from conveying emotion in a scene that has already started, emotional music can also be used for setting expectations of a scene to come. If the gamemaster plays emotional music while the characters are exploring the debris of a burned-down village, the players are much more likely to contemplate the tragedy of what has happened than watch for hidden enemies or search for loot.</p>

			<p>Emotional scenes can be demanding and risk feeling out-of-place, so you might find yourself wanting to save them for a select few moments in your sessions. In such a moment, however, emotional music can help you create the most memorable scene of an entire campaign.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/emotional-music</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Achieving near-seamless audio loops with the overlap feature</title>
		<id>/articles/overlap</id>
		<updated>2013-10-10T22:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<p>An important feature for GMs who use music during their games is the ability to have it loop without interruptions and jarring transitions. When I first started developing RPG Ambience, my intent was to achieve this by implementing seamless looping of tracks. I quickly encountered two major problems:</p>

			<ol><li>First of all, completely seamless looping of audio files does not have good browser support (if any).</li>
				<li>Second of all, and most importantly, very few music tracks have endings that line up with the beginning, making the transition very noticeable even when it’s made seamless.</li>
			</ol><p>With this in mind, I began considering an alternative to seamless looping that is available in some media players: crossfading, which is achieved by fading out the old track while simultaneously fading in the new one. I was optimistic that this approach would be the best and most realistic alternative to truly seamless looping. After manually trying the technique on some tracks, however, I was not completely satisfied; the transition was still very much noticeable for many tracks.</p>

			<p>After a while, I started experimenting with what I at first thought to be a “poor man’s” crossfading: to simply have the new track start a bit before the old track ended, without fading either of them. In earlier versions of RPG Ambience, this was called <dfn>crossover</dfn>, but it has since been renamed <dfn>overlap</dfn>. This turned out to be a very useful technique that consistently matched the quality of crossfading and often exceeded it, many times even achieving unnoticeable transitions.</p>

			<p>The two waveforms below show the difference between an audio loop using crossfading and one using overlap:</p>

			<div class="side-by-side">
				<figure><figcaption>Crossfading</figcaption><img src="/media/crossfading.png" alt="Waveform of a sample transition using crossfading"/><audio src="/media/crossfading.ogg" controls=""/></figure><!--
				--><figure><figcaption>Overlap</figcaption><img src="/media/overlap.png" alt="Waveform of a sample transition using overlap"/><audio src="/media/overlap.ogg" controls=""/></figure></div>

			<p>While the loop using crossfading sounds alright, there is still a noticeable gap between the end of the old track and the beginning of the new track, and the distinct opening drum beat is lost in the fading. The loop using overlap, on the other hand, continues playing the song without even skipping a beat, and retains the opening drum beat.</p>

			<h2>How to use overlap in RPG Ambience</h2>

			<p>This brings us to the implementation of overlap in RPG Ambience. In order to make your audio tracks loop using overlap, go to the <i>Sound</i> tab of a scene and look for the <i>Overlap</i> field at the bottom. This input controls how many seconds early the new track will start before the old track ends. Fractional numbers are allowed, but note that very short durations may not work as intended; due to technical limitations, a value of less than roughly 0.3 might effectively be rounded down to zero.</p>

			<p>It’s important to note that the <i>Overlap</i> setting in the current version of RPG Ambience applies to all track transitions for that scene. In other words, it’s not currently possible to specify that one track should start three seconds early and another track should start five seconds early. I have thought about expanding this functionality in the future, but in absence of such a feature, my experience tells me that a blanket overlap duration of about 2-5 seconds is usually enough to achieve a pretty good result.</p>

			<p>One final note: If the overlap doesn’t seem to take effect properly, make sure that your audio files don’t begin or end with long silences, as some recordings do. A sound editor like <a href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a> can be used to remove those parts from your files.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/overlap</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title><cite>Jade Empire</cite> (oriental)</title>
		<id>/music/jade-empire</id>
		<updated>2013-10-10T21:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/jade-empire.jpg" alt="Cover art for the Jade Empire soundtrack"/></figure><p>While the soundtrack of <cite>Jade Empire</cite> is sadly one of few readily available soundtracks from games with an oriental setting, it’s useful enough that it might just be the only one you need. The calmer tracks draw heavily from Chinese aesthetics while the most dramatic tracks are closer to traditional orchestral arrangements. There are 31 tracks in total, and many of them are uniform enough to be useful without any editing.</p>

			<h2>Suggested scenes</h2>

			<h3>Theme</h3>
			<ol><li value="1">The Way of the Open Palm</li>
				<li value="2">Jade Empire Main Theme</li>
			</ol><h3>Calm</h3>
			<ol><li value="3">Hills and Fields / Dance of the Babbling Brook / Fallow Ground</li>
				<li value="5">Dawn Star Theme</li>
				<li value="23">Silk Fox Theme</li>
				<li value="26">Sky Theme</li>
				<li value="31">Sanctuary</li>
			</ol><h3>Mystery</h3>
			<ol><li value="9">Buried Secrets / Whispers</li>
				<li value="10">Mischief in the Marsh</li>
				<li value="15">House of Spirits / The Dark Land</li>
				<li value="17">3 Winds</li>
				<li value="22">Last Rites / Internment</li>
			</ol><h3>Action</h3>
			<ol><li value="4">Fist / Test Your Mettle</li>
				<li value="7">Fury, Hammer and Tongs</li>
				<li value="20">Into the Fray</li>
			</ol><h3>Epic action</h3>
			<ol><li value="11">Empire at War</li>
				<li value="14">Fires of Chaos</li>
				<li value="29">Soaring / Stormclouds</li>
				<li value="30">Torment / The Way of the Closed Fist</li>
			</ol><h3>Party</h3>
			<ol><li value="6">The Tea House</li>
				<li value="13">A Night Out</li>
				<li value="18">Ballad of the Drunken Revelers</li>
				<li value="24">Wine and Women</li>
			</ol></html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/music/jade-empire</link>
	</entry><entry>
		<title>Enhancing sessions with pre- and post-game music</title>
		<id>/articles/pre-and-post-game-music</id>
		<updated>2013-10-10T20:00:00+02:00</updated>
		<content type="xhtml">
			<html:div>

			<figure><img src="/media/kung-fu-fighting.jpg" alt="The cover of “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas"/></figure><p>It is well known that the opening and closing scenes of a movie can be greatly enhanced by music, and doing the same for your roleplaying games is one way of using RPG Ambience. Both moviegoing experiences and roleplaying sessions, however, actually start before the opening scene and end after the closing scene.</p>

			<p>The real start of the experience is when the audience members arrive—in the cinema or at the gaming table—and it really only ends when they have left. During all of this time before and after the main attraction, the audience will be enthusiastically discussing their expectations, their impressions, and their hopes for possible sequels. Movie directors have no way of influencing this important part of the experience, but gamemasters do, and one effective way of doing so is by playing music before and after the adventure itself.</p>

			<p>The idea behind using pre- and post-game music is to promote a certain mood that you want the players to be in while they are creating their characters or recapping the previous session, as well as when they are discussing the game right after it has finished. The music can simply reinforce themes that are important to the adventure itself, such as starting a horror session with dark, ominous music to get the players in the mood. Conversely, it can also provide contrast, such as ending that same horror session with upbeat music in order to take the edge off the situation.</p>

			<p>The common idea is that you can influence your players to think about the game—and to think about it in a certain manner—even while they’re not playing it.</p>

			<p>Since pre- and post-game music takes place outside of the adventure itself, it doesn’t have to relate directly to any events taking place in-game. This gives you some creative freedom and allows you to select music that would otherwise be difficult to fit into a session.</p>

			<h2>How to select pre- and post-game music</h2>

			<p>For pre-game music, suitable tracks include epic opening themes, menu music from video games, and tracks that are too varying in tempo or mood to use during the adventure itself.</p>

			<p>As an example, consider the first distinct piece of music that plays in the <cite>Knights of the Old Republic</cite> video game. The famous <cite>Star Wars</cite> opening theme doesn’t actually appear until after the player has created his character; during the entire character creation process, the music played is the theme of the Old Republic. This epic composition is too anthemic to easily fit inside an adventure, yet not powerful enough to serve as the adventure’s opening theme (which in any <cite>Star Wars</cite> game is a given). As pre-game music, however, it works perfectly to give the players a sense of epic adventure coupled with the uniquely ancient feel that accompanies games set in this era.</p>

			<p>For post-game music, you have even more leeway in selecting your tracks, because you don’t risk setting the wrong tone for an entire session. Unless your campaign is of a very serious nature, you can even consider using humorous, silly, or even modern-day tracks that tie into the story that you were telling.</p>

			<p>For a recent one-shot game <a href="http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/news/2011/03/01/march-playset-of-the-month-quest-for-the-golden-panda/">set in mythical China</a>, I ended the session with the well-known '70s song “Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas, also notably used in the movie <cite>Kung Fu Panda</cite>. It’s light-hearted, anachronistic, and downright silly, and using it in-game would have ruined the mood, but playing it after the adventure made perfect sense. If you’re not prepared to go that far, look for setting-appropriate music that reinforces the overall experience of the players, such as an upbeat orchestral composition for a session that saw the characters prevail in an epic battle.</p>

			<p>Even if you put a lot of effort into selecting pre- and post-game music, it may not make an obvious difference at the gaming table itself. That’s alright, because the main goal of using pre- and post-music is to affect players subtly, or even subconsciously. If the players start to find themselves feeling that the gaming experience starts as soon as they enter the gaming room, and only ends just after they have left it, you’re doing things right.</p>
		</html:div>
		</content>
		<link rel="alternate" href="">/articles/pre-and-post-game-music</link>
	</entry>
</feed>