Fan Club “Blog” #24: Two amazing mixes for your Public Access campaign & a musical chat

Quinns here! My friend Adam Hay is a BAFTA-winning sound designer for videogames currently working on Usual June. He also composes the music you hear in Quinns Quest reviews. But he's also a player in my home TTRPG games, and gets involved in creating the soundscapes that play while we game.

For Public Access he made us two white-hot, 2 HOUR mixes that I want to share with my Patrons. One is for the game's Day Phase, found here, and another is for the game's Night Phase, found here. Today, I'm pulling Adam in for an interview about the role of sound in TTRPGs.

This is actually the second time I've done a blog post about music in TTRPGs! Be sure to check out Fan Club “Blog” #3: Sharing My Playlists.

Quinns: Adam, my beautiful friend and man. Could you give yourself a short introduction?

Adam: Hello Quinns! Thank you for inviting me to chat through the medium of typed words. I will try not to use too many exclamation marks!

I've spent most of my adult life making sound effects, music, and directing voice actors for video games. If you played the early LEGO games (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman) you've probably heard my work, but I've basically worked everywhere at this point.

Quinns: What else shall we share? Your partner is Emily, who folks will have heard on Play to Find Out... the two of you are learning to skateboard together...

Adam: Yes! My other obsession for doing really dumb boardsports. Which probably came from playing snowboarding and skateboarding videogames, honestly. They always had the best soundtracks!

Learning to skateboard at the age of 40 has been a humbling experience, there’s a certain level of built in terror that I’m sure wasn’t there 20 years ago! But getting encouragement from a 10 year old doing crazy tricks on a miniramp is a novel way to spend a Sunday morning.

Quinns: And I’m benefitting as well! It’s great when you show up to roleplay night and I get to watch a video of one of you-- I mean it feels rude to say “eating shit” but I understand that’s the technical term

Adam: Haha! Yeah it’s fun to watch your pals stack it, isn’t it?

Quinns: Taking us back to roleplaying, you and Emily were able to show off your love of board sports in our Slugblaster campaign. I think it’s fair to say that’s when you both fell in love with TTRPGs?

Adam: Oh man, Slugblaster was THE BEST. I think we all left a piece of our hearts in that game. It had all the elements that are really exciting to me about TTRPGs - sequences where things just spiral madly out of control, adventures that you’d never be able to dream up without your friends across the table - mixed with really juicy character moments. It’s a game that knows exactly what it is and has so many dimensions (literally!) for memorable sessions.

I’d already been microdosed on Dungeons & Dragons at various points in my life, but that was definitely what cemented my love for the hobby!

Quinns: And you and I got to roleplay a kiss together, which was nice.

Adam: Yes that wasn’t weird at all for me or my wife.

Quinns: Now, let’s talk about me SEPARATING you from your wife. Emily didn’t want anything to do with Public Access because it was a horror campaign, so you joined me alone. And then you offered to handle the music! I was so excited.

In just a sec we’ll talk about these two mixes you made (linked at the top of the article), but let’s start by talking about music during TTRPGs in general. I imagine you have some pretty strong thoughts on this??

For me, there is not an inch of my being that can imagine playing TTRPGs without music. Music (or at least sound, as I sometimes play nature soundscapes) is the device that blows the doors off the entrance to the world of imagination.

Without music, it's my opinion that the scenes you're roleplaying can only get to a "9 out of 10". It's only with just the right music that you can take them up to a 10.

Adam: Exactly. Music is such a powerful tool for emotional investment in a story or setting. I always think of my job as being a storyteller, just with abstract sounds rather than words. When we play a TTRPG together we’re all trying to ease ourselves in to the wooorld of imagination with the least friction, and sound just greases the proverbial runway.

Sometimes rather than being ambient underscore, having a diegetic piece of music playing can be a great storytelling tool. Our Slugblaster campaign ended with this amazing setpiece with our characters driving a stolen car through several unreality barriers with Freebird blasting on the radio, as well as the speakers in your actual living room. It sounds a bit cheesy, but at the time it was just thrilling. We were giddy, building everything up to the big guitar solo crescendo!

Quinns: Yes. In my months-long campaign of Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes my players only had one proper gunfight, but when it happened we slapped on the combat playlist we made JUST FOR THIS MOMENT that had a dark techno track from Tzusing and the table just ceased to exist. We were in that scene.

Adam: There’s no replacement for music in those moments! I spend so much time thinking about underscoring drama and tension with music and sound, but you don’t need to overthink it! You can have fun with it.

Just imagine you’re a director picking tracks to score their own movie. Pull from your favourite soundtracks, find something on YouTube by typing in the theme of your game, or just pick tracks from albums that you love.

Quinns: Exactly. I’ve heard a lot of people say that in having so many friends to play TTRPGs with, I (Quinns) am in a ludicrously privileged situation. But, because I’ve worked hard to convince each one of those friends to try roleplaying with me and I really sweat to make it worth their while, it's a privilege that feels earned.

Instead, the bonkers unearned privilege of my home games is that four of my twelve players are music nerds who get excited to put together fabulous soundtracks for our games.

Always when we’re putting together music for our campaigns we think about what different playlists we need. Sometimes that’s as simple as “Exploration” and “Action”. For Mothership my friend Tim helped me to put together “Hesitation”, “Tension”, “Terror”.

I can just always rely on you guys, whether I need the correct mood for a haunted mountain or a freezing cold spaceship. For our Mothership game, Tim gave me an LP by Container to put on “just in case anyone ever sets a self-destruct sequence”. Listen to that link! It's the audio equivalent of a heart attack.

What I can't imagine is you guys finding this stuff by listening to it for fun, just like... while cleaning the house or whatever.

Adam: Haha! Right. There’s a reason that music exists in the first place, and it's not for TTRPGs or just to wind people up when you put it on and someone goes “what the heck is this, is this music you listen to??”

Having broad categories for different vibes is a great way to do things. Most videogame soundtracks will have a set of ‘exploration’ music that is ticking away in the background, which will transition in to the ‘action’ themes when combat happens. It’s a time-honoured system for making those big emotional shifts work, and even though it’s kind of reached meme status almost it’s still powerful. The Exploration/Action dichotomy is the simplest and most effective way of doing a meaningful vibe shift, but if you can go a bit more granular if the setting requires it.

For our game of Slugblaster we made three different Spotify playlists we could contribute to as a group - Chill, Tense and Poppin’ Off. We’d just put the different playlists on shuffle depending on the scene.

In fact, I can link them now. ‘Chill’ was for the hanging around, exposition, exploration scenes, ‘Tense’ would underscore any drama or moments when the stakes had been raised, and ‘Poppin’ Off’ would be for the big chase and action sequences.

Quinns: Blastin' slugs.

Adam: Right. I think one of my memorable moments was a big interdimensional party being broken up by the Space Cops, and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ came on as we cheesed it outta there in different directions! It felt like we were suddenly in an Edgar Wright film.

Quinns: I loved the work you did for Slugblaster, but the mixes you made for Public Access (again, linked at the top of this article) were something else.

What’s interesting here is that it was an opportunity for us to go outside of our usual comfort zone ("Explore", "Action") to work with Public Access’ very specific structure. I told you we wanted a Day Phase soundtrack, which contains a kind of mystic, dusty, desert energy, and a Night Phase soundtrack, when players REALLY SHOULDN’T BE EXPLORING and REALLY SHOULDN’T BE WATCHING THEM TAPES.

Adam: Yes, so Public Access was different, but still perfect for that big theatrical vibe shift!

I put those playlists together a few hours before our first session I think, and I tried not to overthink it. I went with a lot of my favourite albums that suited the analog mystery horror. I had an idea that I was going to write some ambient music specifically for it, but I didn’t have time in the end and just went with a big DJ mix. Looking back at the playlists I basically just mashed up a bunch of albums I really liked, haha!

Public Access with its analog horror vibes was kind of the perfect game to soundtrack for me. I really love the sound of cassettes and VHS and FM radio, that’s how I grew up experiencing music. As a kid I’d listen to music on a walkman and on the cheap boombox that I’d been bought for Christmas, and so the flaws and limitations of those mediums became attached to the feeling and meaning of music for me. My dad had a really loud stereo system too, so the crackle and warmth of vinyl was imprinted on me when he’d play records at loud volumes. Especially if he wanted to spook me a bit with Captain Beefheart or Pink Floyd. I remember being terrified and thrilled at a very impressionable age by my dad’s choice of psychedelic 60s rock! Being unsettled my music was quite a formative experience, and it’s interesting to reflect how much of my musical taste was shaped by all that.

Quinns: It's wild to think that your dad may have shaped his child's entire future by placing you next to a speaker and playing prog rock loud enough. That's like something out of Back to the Future.Adam: I know, right!

Okay, specifics. The Day Phase has a lot of Boards Of Canada tracks in the mix, who kind of invented that nostalgic, videotape-infused sound. It’s so iconic that no one has really imitated it, although there’s so many artists and genres that have been inspired by that sound! Their music, especially the album Geogaddi, has a really dark and unsettling undercurrent to it that makes you feel like a moth being guided to a flame. Lots of sounds and samples that are obscured by layers of VHS and cassette noise. The perfect compliment for our game about finding and watching cursed videotapes!

There’s Aphex Twin and Tim Hecker in there too, both titans of textural, unsettling ambience. Also Mark Korven’s soundtrack to Our House - Mark’s an amazing horror composer who’s work I first heard in the film The Witch. He does a lot of inspiring work with custom acoustic instruments, great material all around to soundtrack a spooky, unsettling night with your friends!

The Night Phase needed to go much harder, so I tried to find the darkest, most sinister music I could. There’s a lot of Lustmord in the mix as a result, probably the king of dark industrial ambient music. Lots of music from Atrium Carceri too, who runs an amazing label called Cryo Chamber that has loads of great cinematic ambient music that might be perfect for underscoring your next TTRPG session!There’s also a bunch of the Resident Evil 4 remake soundtrack too, which was perfect for our Night Phase vibes. There’s a lot of great horror music in videogames specifically! I could talk for hours and hours on this topic, but if you’re in a pinch there’s so many great gaming OSTs to put on. I snuck the Resident Evil 2 typewriter music in the mix as a little easter egg, for the other millennials in our group who stayed up way past their bedtime playing that in their youth.

Quinns: What?! You did? I think all of our players missed that. How did we miss that??

Adam: Hehe. I also wanted to make not just playlists big big, long mixes for our Public Access sessions, as there’s something special about weaving all the music you have into a seamless soundtrack. It really adds to the uneasy atmosphere as you drift from one track to another, and you can build in peaks and troughs to the mood and tension throughout the evening. It’s really fun to be the conductor in that sense!

We’d always start the music from the same place, so when that big booming kickdrum came in at the start of the Night Phase, we knew awful, awful things were about to happen. There’s a sort of Pavlovian response that comes with the familiarity of the mix after a few sessions that I think is really fun as a player. There’s an Aphex Twin track early on (Gwarek2) that is inexplicably full of screaming, and it was always delightfully awful for everyone when that would kick in, just as Quinns is narrating someone’s accidental, gory death or we’ve just started to watch our first haunted VHS tape at the most cursed location we could find.

Quinns: Oh my gosh, yes! That screaming was SO LOUD in the mix. I think there was one session where it came in at the most perfect time to send a shiver down our spine, and another session where it was so out of place I had to tell you to fast forward it a bit while everyone laughed.

In the safe bosom of the Quinns Quest Patreon, I want to admit something to you Adam. Where you first showed up for session #01 holding a mix instead of a playlist, I was actually a bit sceptical. Even though this was more work from you, I wanted a playlist!

Adam: No!

Quinns: Yes! But I’m so happy to say that by session #02 of our campaign, when we were listening to those mixes for the second time, I saw how dead wrong I was. Having all the songs play in the same order... there’s something invisibly comfortable and delightful about it.

It reminds me of how, when you play a video game, you hear the same songs for hours at a stretch and not only do you not mind, your brain starts to glue them to the fictional places that you visit. These mixes are Deep Lake, New Mexico to me. They’re the two sides of the ancient, beloved cassette tape in your walkman. I don't know if I'd feel that way if you'd made two playlists that we just slapped on shuffle.

I’m so happy you made them, and it brings me DEEP joy to think that the Quinns Quest patrons might use them for their own campaign of Public Access, and their own story of the Deep Lake Latchkeys.

Music is magic, isn’t it?

Adam: According to Boards Of Canada, my University lecturer and Pythagoras, Music Is actually Math… that’s a topic for a longer, more boring blog post though.

For now, yes it’s pure bloody magic, something very special that makes everything in life better. It’s a flavour enhancer for our ears!

If you usually play your campaigns in silence, I’d wholly recommend pulling together some tunes from wherever you like into a big playlist or two, and adding that sweet extra layer of atmosphere and emotion to your gaming sessions! Quinns you can rewrite that last sentence to be less rubbish. I didn’t put many points in ‘writing’ when I was rolling my character.