A long, long time ago, I can still remember when I wrote a post that made me smile. It was called How to Describe a Campaign Setting in Twenty Five Words or Less, and it was about how to describe a campaign setting in twenty five words or less fewer. The idea is straightforward: twenty-five words (or fewer) is enough to capture the essence of a mood that one desires to impart to prospective players/readers.
Today, while listening to everybody's favourite scientology-infused mid-70s jazz fusion band, Return to Forever, it occurred to me that this approach to on-the-fly campaign-setting could be augmented by musical soundtracks. Hence, here is a campaign setting in twenty-five words or fewer to the tune of 'The Shadow of Io':
Sword and planet, Barbarella, Buck Rogers, cloud cities, space barges, planetary spheres, Spelljammer, laser blasters, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Amazing Stories, moons, wonder, exploration, odyssey
Hence also:
November, mud, pastoral, overground, Tom Bombadil, faerie, talking animals, hedge witches, redcaps, knockers, black dogs, English gothic, green men, Mythago Wood, hey nonno no!
Andalusia, bullfighting, reconquista, Moors, Carthaginians, sherry, oranges, sunshine, Alhambra, alumbradismo, inquisition, Sierra Nevada, siestas, clergy, monks, gypsies
Abyss, demonic intrusion, summoning, secret societies, goetia, Testament of Solomon, exorcism, possession, warlocks, smiting and banishment, high magic, black magic, sacrifice
Last heavenly city, monasteries, cathedrals, fading defiant grandeur, theocracy, civilisation against barbarism, keeping the flame, paladins, Lanthanum Chromate, Gondor, Viriconium, Nessus
Admittedly some of these examples are rather 'on the nose', but an interesting experiment would be to shuffle one of your Spotify playlists and see what inspiration you come up with, being led by the music first.
I recently finished running a three-year campaign based on Shriekback’s “Nemesis.”
ReplyDeleteVery little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully correctly wrong
Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home
We feel like Greeks, we feel like Romans
Centaurs and monkeys just cluster round us
We drink elixirs that we refine
From the juices of the dying
I like the idea of picking a song at random and making a campaign setting out of it (I thought about doing this with poems) but some genre work better than others. Metal is probably the best...
DeleteOne of my entries for Secret Santicore back in the day was an adventure based on Iron Maiden's Two Minutes to Midnight. https://santicore.blogspot.com/2017/02/2-minutes-to-midnight-santicore-2015.html
DeleteTimely. Everyone hates infodumps so I wrote this last week. I decided that this is all they get for back ground.
ReplyDeleteA long, long time from now...
In a galaxy that's not so very far away...
I knew that if I had a ship
That I could break the Empire's grip
And maybe I could even
make them pay
But the Holiday Special
made me shiver
While the holocrons deliver
bad news to my planet
I thought that they would ban it
I can't remember if I cried
When I heard about the genocide
and Redjac's fall to the Dark Side
The day The Republic died
So bye-bye Miss Imperial Spy
Flew my freighter to the crater
But the crater was dry
Them Saurian boys were drinkin'
pungo & rye
singing This'll be a good day to die
This'll be a good day to die
Did you join the counter-force,
and do you have faith in The Source
if the Star Knights tell you so?
Do you believe in the Rebel cause?
or the old Republic that there was?
And can you the teach me
how to fly real slow?
Well, In 5764
The Rebels started up the war
The Imperials were not concerned
Oh! But soon their lesson was learned
I was a teenage rebel volunteer
who served as a Planetary Privateer
because we had so much to fear
The day The Republic died
I started singing
Bye-bye Miss Imperial Spy
Flew my freighter to the crater
But the crater was dry
Them Saurian boys were drinkin'
pungo & rye
singing This'll be a good day to die
This'll be a good day to die
Blaster, blaster fire faster
I'll learn The Source
from a Star Knight Master
and battle the Empire to the end
We're hiding out in the Rybex Aurora
with our Space Princess Zina Adora
Blasters are
a freedom fighter's only friend
Now the Evil Empire's out force
There's a great disturbance
in The Source
They try to keep us at bay
Oh! But soon we'll show them The Way
Aliens and Rebels and Star Knights
Laser swords and starship fights
all in the name of civil rights
After The Republic died
We were singing
Bye-bye Miss Imperial Spy
Flew my freighter to the crater
But the crater was dry
Them Saurian boys were drinkin'
pungo & rye
singing This'll be a good day to die
This'll be a good day to die
And there we were at the Rebel base
Fighting epic wars in space
with no time left to start again
Oh! Redjac nimble! Redjac sly!
Redjac kissed the Republic goodbye
The Dark Side
is a Void Knight's only friend
The terror weapon was deployed
Klatoonian civilization destroyed
No Void Knight born of Hell
Could have engineered it so well
Though the planet quaked
and broke and cracked
All the mineral wealth remained intact
For Imperial miners to extract
The day The Republic died
and we were singing
Bye-bye Miss Imperial Spy
Flew my freighter to the crater
But the crater was dry
Them Saurian boys were drinkin'
pungo & rye
singing This'll be a good day to die
This'll be a good day to die
Met a princess who sang the blues
and I asked her for some happy news
she just said “My planet died today.”
I went down to the swamps of Yzor
Where I'd heard about
The Source before
But the muppet there
would not show me The Way
On the planets:
the scoundrels schemed
The soldiers died
and the moth-bats screamed
A New Hope has awoken
The Empire will be broken
and the Star Knights that I admire most
Adam Starlight and the Solar Ghost
shipped off to a remote outpost
The day The Republic died
and they were singing
Bye-bye Miss Imperial Spy
Flew my freighter to the crater
But the crater was dry
Them Saurian boys were drinkin'
pungo & rye
singing This'll be a good day to die
Ha, nice!
DeletePut the guy on the cover of Romantic Warrior into the landscape of Yes's Relayer cover...I would play that in a heartbeat
ReplyDeleteRomantic Warrior is one of my all time favourite albums so I am totally behind this. But I also love the idea of album cover mashups as a way to generate campaign inspiration.
DeleteI recall that post on doing a dungeon based on Return to Forever! I enjoyed quite a lot. Earlier this week I got this idea for a Delta Green game set maybe in the early Renaissance based on the album and song titles from this Goth Trad / JK Flesh split called Knights of the Black Table. If I could find a few people to play it I might actually write the damn thing!
ReplyDeleteKnights of the Black Table is a cool name for a cult or cabal of warlocks.
DeleteYes! Even cooler name for a group of grim paladins, men who do what must be done even at the cost of everything they hold dear and their very sanity.
DeleteOne of my favourite ways to pass the time while travelling, etc., is to listen to playlists that represent the various factions, nations, races, civilizations in the various sci-fi and fantasy worlds I enjoy. Songs where the lyrics have various double meanings that are applicable if you read into them the right way, songs that carry the "vibe" of those nations' and factions' stories. Songs that represent both the individual characters within those factions and the faction as a whole, multiple scales and points of focus simultaneously. I spin "music videos" of a sort -- not necessarily images (though sometimes), but essential references, points and arcs in the "story" of that civilization. It keeps me from being bored when I have nothing to occupy me, and more importantly it helps me explore the essence of these "characters" (because a faction, nation, race, etc., is a character, as well as containing and informing characters in the usual sense), giving me a sense of who and what they are in my understanding of the setting and its meaning. Sometimes it takes a while to find a fit, sometimes a song just instantly works. I have my Babylon 5 list, my Mass Effect list, my Traveller list, my Halo list, etc. Sometimes, an entire franchise/show/story finds a single song -- I have a Farscape (entire) entry. So basically, yes, song and lyrics are a great way to encapsulate endless complexity in something accessible.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what the correlation is between people who think this way and people who watched Fantasia growing up.
DeleteHm, an interesting idea. Though it requires that both describer and his/her audience share a taste for music. Not a given nowadays.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I can't fail to notice that your examples are the other way around - not campaigns described by songs, but songs seeming to propose campaigns. Though this is arguably more useful anyway. ;))
Mike
Going a bit off tangent here, as this does not rely on music alone: the framing segment of RAI's 1982 Marco Polo, with the Krull version of the Battle of Curzola, is what I usually point to my friends as how I imagine the original 1987 version of Forgotten Realms to be, in form and content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8askgtGfoI - the way the characters speak, the way the armor is a mix of (barely-kind-of) historical and very 80s at the same time, the vaguely elegiac tone. Genoa, Pisa, Amalfi, Venice...The original Zentharim! Thats what being sent as mercenary to Phlan in Pool of Radiance should feel like, at least to me.
ReplyDeleteNice - I did not know this existed.
DeleteI asked random.org for a date and got July 15, 1963. The US Billboard number 1 on this day was Sakamoto Kyu's "Ue o Muite Arukō" (or, ahem . . .or as it charted, Sukiyaki . . . I will henceforth refer to Please Please Me as Salt and Pepper Chips, but I digress). I am imagining a restive city state where an alien demigod and his retinue are set to arrive, and the overlord is attempting to retrofit a hitherto neglected temple to receive him and them, confident that he'll get little pushback as only pigeon-bread ladies spend any time there anymore. Wrong. The government is soon wobbling, under fierce pressure from a increasingly chaotic mishmash of factions working against this outrage. The overlord wonders at the same time what this demigod might do when he finds he has no temple in which to alight. Predictably, the archeological sites start spewing forth artifacts of the til-now neglected pigeon-bread lady goddess. PCs can engage in some patriotic tomb-robbing for sure. I won't say it's Slaa. P., but I will mouth the letters.
ReplyDeleteAh, Slaadpunk. That's one of the 'entries I never wrote' that I still haven't got round to writing...
DeletePhilip Glass' Akhenaton was a major soundtrack in my online Mesopotamian-styled campaign, and because it was online I could pipe the music in to our play sessions (while Discord supported music bots anyway).
ReplyDeleteSetting aside titles, a lot of Glass's stuff works for this kind of musical campaign inspiration.
Delete