Dungeons, Dragons, Soundscapes: Sound Effects as a GM Tool

By Kyle O'Hara

It's an oft-repeated theme on many gaming forums – where does sound fit in with my game? Typically the topic of conversation is more background music and less sound effects, but the general consensus seems to be “Use what suits your group best”. And that's true. Music and sound effects aren't for every game group out there. But for those who choose to use it, sound is a powerful tool for setting atmosphere, highlighting important moments, climactic battles... the limit is your imagination.

Sound design is a weird and wonderful mix of technical dry work and pure creativity, and music and sound can skyrocket your game's feeling to whole new levels. In movies, it's the sound and music that sets the tone more than the visual aspect of it. You know what I mean – you're watching a movie, and slowly the music takes on a more tense tone, getting louder, and louder and louder, more tense until you're ready to snap, then BANG! A monster jumps out, or whatever. It wasn't the character walking down the empty hall that had you on the edge of your seat, it was the tense music making your heart race.

Using sound in your game is no different. Use it to underlie your BBEG monologues, to emphasize the mounting tension as the orc army draws near with wardrums pounding in the distance. It can be as simple as a nice long mp3 of foresty sounds you found on the Internet as background sound, you hit play, maybe set it to repeat, and you're good to go back to focusing on the game. That's fine. It can get a lot more in-depth than that, though – the more direct control you're willing to exercise, the more detailed you can get with your sounds in-game.

This talk is all fine and good, but what I hear you saying is, “Kyle, how do we do this? Tell us how we can make sounds our next big GM tool!” Well, alright, if you insist.

There are multiple ways of getting sound effects and background music up and running for your game, and I will be covering many of them in this series. Today, I'll be showing you how to build them yourself using free software and sounds, my preferred method. Over the course of this series I'll cover various other methods and resources as well.

For starters, you can just grab things off the internet. There are numerous places that offer royalty-free sound effects you can use, such as freesound.org. You can find all manner of … well, anything there, download them, and use them. They're created and uploaded by other users, with quite a good search function.

So, you've got yourself all the awesome explosions and fire sound effects you want, and you want to stick them together. Here's where you need another program. There are all kinds of them – any professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) will do the trick, but there are free alternatives. The best one out there is Audacity, available at http://audacity.sourceforge.net for free. It does a lot of the basics of a DAW, and even supports AU plug-ins. For our purposes, though, it has pretty much everything you'll need to get rolling with sound for your game.

This week's theme here at the Flying Pincushion is Gilgamesh, so today we'll be putting together some sound effects for a forest scene such as when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel through the forest to steal cedar trees. And we'll be using 100% free stuff to do it! I'll show you how to make this sound file:

 http://soundcloud.com/sonicdirgeproductions/

Step 1: Decide which sounds you need.

To begin with, we need to figure out what sounds belong in the scene we're trying to build. A forest scene needs birds, leaves rustling, a river off in the distance perhaps. Lots of atmosphere and background noise. You can record the sounds yourselves if you have the gear for that, of course, but for those that don't, head on over to www.freesound.org and find yourselves some sounds. You can search for specific sounds, but don't forget to try a general search for “forest” and see what comes up. As it happens, right near the top of the “forest” search, there's one called “Fryers Forest Dawn long version” which suits our purposes perfectly. Then search “river” and there's a file called Beek1.wav that's a nice high-quality recording of a river sound.

Step 2: Download the sounds and import them into Audacity

Okay. So, we've downloaded some sounds that we would like to put together. Open up Audacity, go to File>Import>Audio, and select the sounds – in our case, the forest and river sounds. When the prompt pops up, select “make a copy of the selected files”, which copies the files and edits the copies so the originals stay untouched. Now we have two tracks – the forest and the river sounds. You can just hit play and hear both tracks at the same time, but the river one is much shorter than the forest one.

Step 3: Fill the Gaps

We want the river to be a constant background noise that lasts the length of the whole thing. Fixing this problem is simple – double-click the river clip to select it, hit Cmd+C (Ctrl+C for Windows users) to copy it, click again somewhere after the end of the clip, hit Cmd/Ctrl+V to paste it. Now, at the top of the window you have the transport area (play, pause, fast forward, etc.) and to the right of that, a bank of six icons. These are your tools – you have the Selection tool active right now. Click the bottom middle icon (a line with an arrow at either end) to activate the Time Shift tool. Then click and drag the pasted clip to the left until it meets the end of the first clip. Then, click the darker line at the meeting point to fuse the clips together. Then repeat the process for the new, double-length clip you just made, and again until you've matched the length of the forest clip. If you've filled it up and the river clip is now longer, click on the river clip at the spot that the forest clip ends (the end of the forest clip will blink yellow to show that it's perfectly aligned), and hit Cmd/Ctrl+I to split the clip at that location, then double-click the extra bits you don't want and hit backspace. The bulk of the work is now done!

Step 4: Tinker with the Sound

Alright, we have our basic clip complete. But we wanted the river in the background, remember? We could just make the river quieter (the volume control is the slider with – and + on the base of the track, left side of the screen). That works just fine, if you want the river to sound like it's right nearby. If you want it in the distance, you will need to do a little more work. Double-click the whole river clip to select it, then in the top menu bar click Effect, and select Equalization. This opens an EQ tool that gives you control over the levels of any specific frequency in the clip. To make the river sound farther off, we need to sink off the higher frequencies. The easiest way to do this is to click the Graphic EQ button on the bottom left, and just pull down the sliders starting at the far right, all the way to the bottom. Click Preview to hear what it will sound like, and keep doing that until it's satisfactorily far-away-sounding. Then hit OK to apply the effect.

Step 5: Save the Sound

Save the session (File>Save Project). If you want to have this sound you've created as an mp3, use File>Export. It will default to .WAV, if you want it as an mp3 instead simply select that on the drop-down menu, and it will export the sound in that format. I recommend using .WAV though, as it is an uncompressed lossless format with much higher quality than mp3. Alternatively, you can just use Audacity itself to playback the sound when you need it. If you want it to loop until you say stop, select the entire clip by double-clicking and on the top menu, click Transport>Loop Play. It will keep looping the audio until you hit stop.

There we go! We're done. Your only limits in what you can create in this manner are the sound files you can find, and your own creativity in putting them together and editing them. 

The Fine Line: Challenge and Contradiction

By Scott Bingham

                                                  Image by Dranxis and taken from www.deviantART.com

Hello all! Welcome to the Flying Pincushion and this week’s theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is my first week joining the wizards of words and write-ups and I’m honored to be among their number. For my part we’ll be taking a step back from the stats and rules and focusing more on the overseeing responsibility that is the Game Master. Knowledge of rules and story building aside, what traits make a GM truly great?

For this we look to the Epic, particularly the character development of Enkidu the Wild Man. Enkidu was created by the gods as a companion and party member to Gilgamesh. His character sheet probably marks him as a human Druid/Barbarian hybrid with the alignment of Chaotic Good. His knowledge of the wild and strength of arm is matched by Gilgamesh alone and upon their first encounter demonstrates that he will act upon what he feels is right for the greater good.

Soon after however the party of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is presented a quest. They must journey to the cedar forests and slay the guardian Humbaba. Upon learning of the challenge ahead Enkidu expresses his fear to Gilgamesh declaring that he has seen and knows of Humbaba and says that he is a foe that they cannot overcome. Gilgamesh presses his companion and prepares himself weapons, even seeking the guidance and blessing of the gods before setting off. When they reach the cedar forests their Game Master does a phenomenal job of presenting them with dreams pertaining to their quest, giving them more information on the guardian Humbaba through successful skill checks on the part of Enkidu. Still the wild man discourages Gilgamesh, believing that such an enemy is beyond them.

When Humbaba finally shows himself Enkidu cries out that now is the time for Gilgamesh to live up to his boasting and press forward, the exact opposite of what he encouraged earlier. The battle is long and taxing but together the two overcome Humbaba. Before the killing blow Humbaba begs Gilgamesh to spare him promising to enter his servitude and gift to him all the trees of the forest, even saying that he will construct a palace for Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is moved by compassion and would have spared the guardian if not for Enkidu. Enkidu insists that they must slay Humbaba and Gilgamesh gives heed to his companion striking down the guardian of the forest.

Following their victory over Humbaba Gilgamesh is approached by the goddess of love and fertility Ishtar. He rebukes her, recounting to Ishtar her long history of broken hearts and promises. Enraged by rejection Ishtar demands that the gods unleash the Bull of Heaven on Uruk to punish Gilgamesh. Enkidu and Gilgamesh combat the bull and slay it following which Enkidu threatens and taunts the goddess Ishtar by throwing the bull’s right thigh at her.

Now as a Game Master it is my responsibility to run the campaign, ensure that my players are enjoying themselves, and keep people in line with the rules. Every now and again however it is also my responsibility to pull a player aside and discuss with them their choices and actions to see if they really are playing in character. My discussion with Enkidu would probably go something like this;

“Can I see your character sheet please? I want to double check your alignment.”

“I’m chaotic good. Enkidu is a wild man but seeks to do what is right because he feels it is so, like when he challenged Gilgamesh to a duel because Gilgamesh was sleeping with the brides before their husbands got to.”

“Right. I gathered that much. Why then did Enkidu insist that he and Gilgamesh slay Humbaba?”

“Enkidu was jealous of Humbaba’s offer and thought that Gilgamesh might come to love Humbaba more than Enkidu. It made sense to him at the time.”

“And then Enkidu’s threat to the goddess Ishtar. What’s up with that?”

“He wanted to send a message. That’s why he ripped off the bull’s leg and threw it at her.”

“Hm… You do realize that Enkidu’s actions of late have been more evil than good right?”

From there I would either readjust Enkidu’s alignment based on his actions or another viable option is to follow the course of Enkidu’s real GM, in this case the Epic itself. Upon their encounter with the Bull of Heaven the beast offers up three snorts, the third of which causes Enkidu to fall to the ground but quickly rise up and recover. This attack causes Enkidu to roll a save that he fails, causing him to fall ill following their defeat of the bull. From his sick bed Enkidu lets loose a string of curses, condemning the gods and the woman who enlightened him from his own wild nature. Enkidu’s bad luck continues as he fails more saves, dreaming of the underworld and suffering on a bed of pain for twelve agonizing days before dying. It is likely that his Game Master added on penalties for Enkidu’s past actions and decisions, choices that contradicted his alignment sending Enkidu into a downward spiral that ended in his own destruction.

Though this example is a bit extreme it is also a strong reminder of the Game Master’s responsibility to hold our players accountable. When a player performs acts that contradict their alignment we must discover what caused them do so. The more digging we do and the more constructive questions we ask helps our players to better understand their character beyond what the stat sheets say. And in the instance that a player makes a poor decision that falls outside of their character it is an open invitation to the Game Master to bring them back before the consequences stack up beyond what they can scale.

                This is not a justification to seize control and micromanage our players. At times we must even take a step back and ask ourselves ‘Was this really fair? Did I act justly?’ As a Game Master we take upon ourselves the creation of worlds if nothing more than to act as the playground to our players. We learn the rules, write the stories, and guide our players through their adventure and the very psyche of their characters. It’s why we roll the dice in the first place.