A wonderful thing you can do to enhance the gaming experience is to play music appropriate for the game’s setting. This is true of both board games and role playing games!
Matt Mercer, the dungeon master for Geek and Sundry’s twitch show Critical Role uses a masterful selection of music to set their environments and situations. Critical Role music selections come from a couple of sources:
Plate Mail Games – high quality professional background loops for a variety of genres
But if you’re looking for the Critical Role theme song, you won’t find theme there. That was written by Jason Charles Miller, and I believe you can download it on iTunes.
Another great source for gaming environments is Tabletop Audio. Some of these loops are ambience and sound effects, some of them are movie-score like compositions. But they’re all free to use at home! If you do use them a lot though, it’s friendly and good of you to contribute to the creator’s Patreon account.
When Geek and Sundry’s webseries Tabletop had its record-setting Indiegogo campaign last year, one of the stretch goals reached was the creation of a new RPG show to be produced as well. That show is a now a thing you can watch called Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana. Right now we’re 3 episodes into the 10 episode series, plus a bonus ‘episode 0′ that fills you in on the rpg system being used, the story’s universe, and the characters’ backstories.
When Geek and Sundry launched their Twitch channel in March of this year, they also created a tentpole of their livestreaming with Critical Role. This is a separate RPG show, where a group of friends play their weekly Dungeons and Dragons (5ed) game for approximately 4 hours. It’s just like your game and mine, except cameras are rolling. And those cameras are excellently run by the Geek and Sundry staff. And the group are lead by a very talented game master (GM) in Matt Mercer. And the party of adventurers are all voice actors with an incredible knack for performing their characters.
So it’s a little better than your game and mine at home.
I think you should watch both, but in case anyone was conflicted between between #savegrog and #savethebeer , here’s a quick comparison of the two.
Like It Is, or Like It Is in Hollywood
Critical Role plays it like it is. These folks are playing an excellent game of DnD and there’s no reason your home game can’t be very similar. Players are making nerdy jokes and chomping on vegan pizza while their characters haggle with the local shopkeep, polymorph into animals, or downing a cask of ale they had stashed in the bag of holding. If it’s any different from your previous RPG experience it’s probably because your friends weren’t as experienced.
Titansgrave is a whole realm of production beyond what you and I will do at home. They’ve had the resources or artists, video editors, and graphic designers augment the experience to a level that if you try to mimic it, you’ll probably fall over before you have a chance to finish your storyline. Your everyday GM shouldn’t bother trying to make this sort of immersion happen — but holy cow is it awesome. Watching Titansgrave feels a lot more like watching a movie. Enjoy it the same way you enjoy a summer blockbuster.
Matt vs. Wil
Matt is clearly an amazing GM and his quick acting of NPCs is clearly at another level. Wil lacks some of the quickchange voice-acting cred, but also gets a lot of credit for creating one heck of a new universe in Titansgrave. Using a less-developed system has also given him a lot of power, so I think Titansgrave really feels like we see a lot more of Wil’s mind that Critical Role shows us playing around in Matt’s.
That, and Wil is my man-crush. But Matt might be yours.
Matt Mercer
How’s Your Schedule?
Twitch has become the hot new place for Geek and Sundry to release content. Good on ’em for keeping up with the times. What that means though is that unless you start matching the Twitch stream’s scheduling, you’re missing out on the full experience. Titansgrave is still posted asynchronously — so if you watch it 5 hours after it comes out, you’re still on par with the rest of the world. 5 hours late on Twitch is missing the whole episode. Critical Role is definitely an in-the-moment experience. The episodes still get posted later (here) but it’s just not the same. Plus you miss out on the chat room with the other “Critters,” which is a pretty great way to participate with an RPG show.
All I’m saying is, to max out your fandom you might need to think about just how available you can be Thursdays 7pm PT.
Matt Mercer has been DMing this same group of performers (most of them are voice actors, which makes the characters really awesome) for a long time. Critical Role is normally the group’s weekly DnD game, but episode 12 are tips and tricks on how to run your own game and get new characters started. The DMing advice really starts at 42 minutes in and lasts about an hour, but you can see the whole video here:
Alex "Gus" Gustafson 