Music for Dungeons + Castle Grief Sword & Sorcery Zine w/ Cassette

Plus Metal Tabletop RPGs - Glumdark

In a recent Vintage RPG post, Stu Horvath revisited the dungeonsynth album Music for Dungeons by Gnoll. The project came from Heimat Der Katastrophe, a Milano, Italy based “DIY label focused on ambient punk, minimal-synth, dungeon-drone, wartime music and post-nuclear wave.” HDK has released many tabletop roleplaying game related soundtracks in recent years.

Here is the label’s description of the Music for Dungeons album:

Designed as a soundtrack of the solitary role-playing game titled "Dungeons" edited by Dungeoneer Games & Simulations, the second chapter of GNOLL is ideal for those who love dark vibrations and sense of wonder. With its analogic synthesizers and its thundering percussions will transport you into the atmosphere of the 70s comics of Conan the Barbarian and the classic silver age heroic-fantasy literature.

In the Vintage RPG article, Stu shares what sounds like a very cool TTRPG-related accessory that was included in the physical version of the album:

“It’s basically two long tracks, one per side, and it was written to accompany Dungeoneer’s solo game Dungeons (hence the title), which I am unfortunately unfamiliar with — I believe the Peter Pagano album art draws from the game’s art. However, there is a delightful treat: Dungeons & Caverns, a booklet/module for designing dungeons, by none other than Spaghetti Quester. The generator is really more of a prompt-giver, codifying six dungeon types and offering six variants of each, arranged in nesting tables. The real treat is the collection of example dungeons, fully annotated and in color! Twelve of them! They’re great fun and I would totally use them in a game.”

Stu’s post includes example pages from the booklet. You can listen to Music for Dungeons here:

By the way, Stu Horvath frequently shares his expertise on both TTRPGs and music. In addition to writing a definitive guide to roleplaying games (Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground), he also penned the article “The Music and the Dice,” which analyzes the overlap between music and RPGs. Plus, he co-hosts the Iron Maiden podcast Maiden Voyage with Ed Coleman.

Also of note, Stu’s Vintage RPG podcast co-host John “Hambone” McGuire has feet firmly planted in both music and TTRPGs as well. He is a bassist and has an active crowdfunding campaign for Avon By The Sea, a seaside horror adventure for 321RPG in which kids “face vampires in a storm-ravaged town with streamlined, cinematic gameplay.”

New Sword & Sorcery Zine from Castle Grief with Soundtrack Cassette

Castle Grief has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a new zine called Twin Sun Sutra that is “set in the harsh, gritty sword and sorcery world of Kal-Arath.” I supported Castle Grief’s previous Kickstarter for the previous three Kal-Arath zines and was very impressed by the quality and creativity.

Here is a description of the new zine:

Twin Sun Sutra will include a blood-spattered short comic, new modes of play (including the Pulp Mode I've been using myself in my solo campaigns to...ahem...kick a little more ass when I don't feel like dying all the time!)

As well as tables, tables, tables to add more depth, flavor and action to your own solo or group game, new monsters, and of course, this is a Castle Grief project, so there will be plenty of art to inspire your own adventures.

I expect the zine to be around 30-40 pages, but past efforts have often gone past my initial assessment by 15-20 pages. I don't waste a ton of space, and pack a lot of gameable content into a small number of pages.

I'm excited to work on this zine to expand and explore some of the ideas and flavor from the core booklet and bring it to life...in color!

This zine will be printed in color, and will feature acrylic and watercolor paintings inside and on the cover for more of that blood-spattered pop, and an end product I hope you're all happy to have on your shelf.

To make this project even more appealing to readers of Critical Hit Parader, it also offers a soundtrack cassette tape with over 30 minutes of music composed by Gelu Morsis. Pledge your support for Twin Sun Sutra here.

Metal Tabletop RPG Campaigns

With February being Zine Month / Zine Quest, there are a lot of other cool TTRPG crowdfunding projects occurring right now. GamesRadar has published a list of “6 of the most metal tabletop RPG campaigns crowdfunding right now” to help “metalheads, alternative kids, and followers of ancient evils” find the perfect project to support.

One of the campaigns mentioned is the Heavy Metal Monster Manual, which I covered in last week’s newsletter. Another project in the article I wanted to highlight is Glumdark, which is described as a “beautiful, grim resource for dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying games.” Here are some additional details:

A massive, fully illustrated, painstakingly constructed resource for Game Masters and players of dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying games. Recommended for the likes of Mörk Borg but totally system agnostic and compatible with Shadowdark, Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or any other TTRPG.

The Glumdark Book is the result of years of research, writing, illustrating and design work. Heavily inspired by medieval bookmaking, Glumdark shares a design language with graphic design from before the era of graphic designers.

The layout for the example pages looks amazing, which makes sense when you read about the process:

We've been doing loads of research in libraries across America, as well as references and inspiration found in the museums and countryside castles of Slovenia and Croatia. Medieval bookmaking provided reference for the typography, design and layout.

We adopted a time-honored tradition of setting type and providing typeset pages to our illustrator, a practice made popular long before the ubiquity of printmaking in books. This granted full creative freedom to fill those spaces as the artist saw fit. This allowed for much more fluid and engaging design, and creative layouts where illustration roams freely and lives among the text.

One of the main creators behind Glumdark is Christopher Drellow, who among many other talents is a musician. Christopher was interviewed recently on Diogo Nogueira’s Weird Games and Weirder People podcast and talked about his relentless need to be creative. You can listen to the podcast episode here:

The campaign includes a soundtrack called Vol 4., and Christopher detailed the creative process for the music in a campaign update post. Here is a brief excerpt:

So when I started working on Vol. 4, I wanted to give myself some artistic constraints. I'd never tried to make genre music before (and I probably still haven't successfully done that), but it felt easier to achieve with a pre-defined sonic palette.

So I bought a sample pack of cinematic timpani percussion and grabbed some Kontakt instruments for choirs, hudry gurdy, organ, and orchestral strings. Then I developed a couple of patches for the Arturia Retrologue and a Prophet 5 clone which nailed the gritty 80s synth vibe I wanted. Finally I grabbed my electric guitar and plugged it directly into the sound card.

I appreciated the way Christopher goes into the deep music-nerd details in the full post. You can listen to one of his soundtrack song demos here…

…and you can pledge your support at the Glumdark campaign page.