The First GM Inspiration: Good Music - Showcasing Castle Rat

 

The First GM Inspiration: Good Music - Featuring Castle Rat

Any good GM will find that you want to have a decent environment in which to sit down and work out a good scenario or two, or develop a decent campaign. Sure you probably want some decent desk space, a laptop or notebooks, graph paper, rules handy in whatever medium you prefer (PDF, print, whatever)....but when you've got all that down, and some quiet time to focus, music may also prove truly inspirational. Music, if you can bring it to the game table, can also be very mood setting if done right. 

To that end, I want to draw your attention to Castle Rat, a dark downtempo heavy metal music band founded by singer Riley Pinkerton, which has two albums out now that provide incredible backdrops to fantasy gaming, and sword & sorcery in particular. If you want to get right to seeing if this music works for you, check them out here on Bandcamp, featuring their two albums, Into The Realm and Bestiary. I have no particular favorite here, both are equally amazing productions. 

If you only listen to the music of Castle Rat then you are missing their amazing videos. The Castle Rat Youtube channel is worth putting on in the background while crafting as a GM; the retro aesthetic of their videos feels like an imaginative "re-envisioning" of what I think many D&Ders might have held in their minds as teens and kids back in the 70's and 80's when listening to music for gaming, as opposed to the reality, which was mostly mired in the presentations of low budget films in that period. The videos are great though, worth a watch to see the Rat Queen battle the Rat Reaperess and many other lovely scenarios played out in metal ballad form.

Dagger Dragger remains my favorite:

Anyway, check them out! 

Music - Three Albums To Listen To - Dead Planet by Eat Static, Balle by Yullipe, and Tamoanchan by El Buho

One thing I want to do with this blog in 2018 is to explode it a bit. I can only write about games so much, but I also happen to love music, archaeology, astronomy and other stuff such as good books. I won't ever dive into politics -the blog is my happy space!- but I'd love to write about these other interests more, and how they might also bend around gaming. Music, for example, is excellent for background noise during games. Indeed, I used to do this more often on the blog a few years ago....

I'm a huge fan of Bandcamp, which is a fantastic resource for finding and supporting a bewildering variety of musicians on the world scene. Over the last couple years I've discovered some really incredible gems at Bandcamp, and thought I'd share them with you.

Fair warning: I love music, but I'm eclectic in my tastes and I'm not much of a critic, so if you want to read the almost poetic and nuanced reviews of music available elsewhere....well, head on over to elsewhere and get that! I'll just be using my plain language attempt to convey what is so cool about this stuff, while linking you to it since listening to the actual music at Bandcamp is so easy, anyway.

First up, the album I love the most and have listened to almost more than anything in the last two years or so...

Dead Planet by Eat Static:



The science fiction thematics, the electronic conveyance of lost worlds and strange stars, the general sense of the otherworldly are all embedded deep in this music.

Next up is Tamoanchan by El Buho.  his is a deep, modern take on traditional Mesoamerican themes, mixed with modern dark tones and content. It's very resonant and excellent mood music.



For something especially different and haunting try Balle by Yullipe, a Japanese artist who marks industrial music such as Nine Inch Nails as well as 90's Japanese theatrical bands (which feel a bit to me like the Japanese version of grunge from that time) as her influence....but listen to her work, it's singularly unique and haunting. An interesting article is here about her and the Japanese music scene, along with the problems of public dance spots in Japan.