When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

I thought Jason Graves was a strange choice for Tomb Raider at first. I associate his name with Dead Space, where I first heard of him, and I’m not familiar with the soundtracks for those games yet. The big thing that Lara Croft has been missing, musically, in my opinion, is a terrific theme. Would Jason Graves provide that?

Sort of. Tomb Raider features a pretty decent theme for Lara Croft… but we barely get to hear it in this score and I remain skeptical whether it’s a theme that we’ll hear build or expand in follow-up games. Even the Lara Croft movies failed to stick to a musical theme for her. A shame.

Having played Tomb Raider now [here's my review] I see why Jason Graves was chosen. It’s sort of an adventure game but it’s definitely a survival game — and it’s sometimes horrific. Graves brings urgency, dread, melancholy, and hope to the score, especially through wonderful percussion motifs, but the menace and action is often frantic. I’ve listened to the score a few times now but my first impression was that it was too aggressive to fall into the background while I wrote. Yet I have it on now and the sound is coming across as something more varied than my first listen suggested. So I’ll give it a shot for certain writing projects — I certainly enjoy the textured strings and variety of percussive elements in here.

If Graves can build on the Tomb Raider theme here in a future game, I’ll be happy.

I got Tomb Raider from the Amazon MP3 store.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

Lair Soundtrack

John Debney and Kevin Kaska composed a stirring and bold score for the ill-fated video game, Lair, about dragon-riding knights doing battle across fantasy kingdoms. Though I haven’t played Lair, I got into its world a bit through the now-defunct website and world-building designs on display there. The artists behind the game considered the looks of everything from textiles and banners to palaces and cities, creating a sense of the place and culture even without the story within the game to carry me through it. That’s what got me looking for the soundtrack, as I recall, and I’m glad I found it. This is a go-to soundtrack for me when I’m writing or playing fantasy material.

Some tracks, like the main title, are combinations of proud horns, sweeping strings, and dramatic choral pieces — what the kids might call “epic.” That same track, though, also contains a contemplative melody that suggests more than bombast. The whole soundtrack is like that — a great mix of moods and motifs without being scattered. This is a complete work for a single world that easily transplants to other fantasy realms for play.

Speaking of play, the way these tracks are built makes them great for mood-setting in RPG play. The track called “Diviner Battle” opens dramatically, serving as a nice mood-setter, before driving into a menacing mix worthy of battle. “Blood River,” “Serpent Strait,” and numerous other tracks provide great background music for combats heroic and frantic. One of my most played, though, is “Firestorm,” which has a great vocal motif and a marching forward momentum — good for action of various sorts, not just battle — so it feels as much like music for a rescue as it does a heroic combat.

“Funeral Pyre,” meanwhile, is a short moody piece great for backing up sorrowful remembrance or a bit of ominous exposition. The Diviner’s theme is a foreboding piece that turns triumphant, great for the darkness before the march to dawn. “Ruins of Mokai” is a wonderful short piece for sadness, grief, or even bitter victory.

Probably my most played track of all these, though, is “Darkness Theme,” which I’ve used for mournful allies and complex villains alike. This was, more or less, the theme for the enemy queen in my Viking-themed D&D 4th Edition game, though I also used it for various other magical practitioners from her tradition, so it wasn’t easy to tell if this was “bad guy music” or not.

Lair is a terrific soundtrack. While it’s a shame that we probably won’t get sequel games with sequel scores to expand on this world, Lair gives us a terrific source of music for fantasy-adventure games with the added bonus that your players probably won’t associate its themes with baggage or recollections from this or that film. Recommended.

I bought Lair at the iTunes store.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

Alan Silvestri’s Beowulf

Sometimes, it’s just a small part of a soundtrack that makes its way into my repertoire for writing or play. Case in point: “Beowulf Slays the Beast” from Alan Silvestri’s musical score for the Robert Zemekis adaptation of Beowulf. I haven’t actually, uh, seen the film. I’ve heard only samples of the rest of the score but I’ve heard this one track approximately one-hundred million times. It’s a staple of my fantasy action/adventure playlists and RPG adventures.

Why? Momentum. It has bold horns and a dramatic choral element and great percussion and it’s all brought together with a terrific forward momentum for six minutes. I first bought this track for my Northlanders-meets-D&D campaign a few years ago but I use it in fantasy RPG play of all sorts now. It’s a great backdrop to battle. It starts with a wonderful verve for battle and becomes more serious and dark as it goes. And it loops nicely. Great action music for play.

I bought Alan Silvestri’s “Beowulf Slays the Beast” at the iTunes store.

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

Skyfall soundtrack

Rather than go off on a tangent about my love for David Arnold’s Bond scores, let’s look right at Thomas Newman’s Skyfall. I know some fans who felt it wasn’t distinctly enough a Bond score, and I sympathize. At the same time, I get a kick out of the unusual minimalism used when Newman doesn’t so much quote the Bond theme as allude to it. The opening notes of the film accompany the sudden appearance of a Bond out of focus, on the track “Grand Bazaar, Istanbul.” It’s a wonderful gesture of the Bond we know — even if that Bond is about to be torn down and reconstructed, again. Only “Breadcrumbs” gives us a complete statement of the theme, here.

I got and heard the Skyfall score before the film opened, so as I listen to it I remember not only the film we all saw but the sketch of a film I imagined from hearing the music the first time. I heard familiar horn blares and orchestral builds not quite committing to the whole Bond theme. I heard simple percussive, aggressive battles in tracks like “Silhouette.” I heard traces of Bourne-like motion in “New Digs” and a brush of Adele’s title theme in “Komodo Dragon.” I heard what I was so sure was a climactic and maybe bittersweetly heroic action beat (it wasn’t) with a bombastic statement of Bond horns at the end of the track, “She’s Mine.” The Skyfall score reminds me of two films, then — one I saw and one I didn’t.

While I haven’t had a chance to play Skyfall during RPG play, it’s allusions to Bond without actual Bond statements make it a great tool for me, because it suggests Bond-like action or intrigue without quoting Bond so much that it might feel like parody in practice at the game table. The two halves of the opening sequence’s score, “Grand Bazaar, Istanbul” and “The Bloody Shot,” are each 4+ minutes of building adventure and action which could work during play. (I try not to use tracks less than 4 minutes for action scenes unless I have enough of them that they won’t loop too often.)

Other tracks offer additional moods, of course. “Quartermaster,” for example, offers a bit of peril and panic for investigations on a deadline. “Enquiry” has dramatic momentum and thematic allusions all over in its brassy horns, all of it petering out at the end, which can be useful sometimes.

I got Skyfall from the iTunes store.

I first heard about it at Polygon. They’re my preferred source for video-game news and features these days. Tweets followed quickly on those heels—some of those tweets asking me directly if I was excited to hear the news. And, yes, I was excited to hear the news, to see the artwork.

A new Thief game is coming to next-gen consoles in 2014.

(Learn more at Game Informer.)

Game Informer’s April Cover

The original game, Thief: The Dark Project, is probably the video game I have played the most. I mean, I played that game over and over and over again, exploring the levels as stealth puzzles, as action experiences, as comedic romps—I ran around in that game until I wore down the carpets. I sanded it smooth through play. I played through most levels until they weren’t scary anymore, until I could predict almost every AI reaction and recite the dialogue of wandering foes by memory. I wore that game down to a nub. Then I played it again.

To me, Thief was both entertainment and school. It was like a game-design how-to class in world-building, environmental narrative, and linear ludic storytelling through level design. Yeah, I love that game.

Though I’ve meditated on Thief a whole lot, I’ve written about it only a little bit. I contemplated its writing in a piece called “Magic Words.” I wrote about its level design and use of religion in an article called “Robbing Gods.” Both of those were published at The Escapist, years ago. (Both of those articles pale, by the way, compared to Kieron Gillen’s stellar piece, “Journey Into the Cradle,” which examines a single powerful level of the third game, Thief: Deadly Shadows.)

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