Creepy Music

[Comte]

Hey after reading the couple of by ynnen I got the urge to put together a list of creepy music that I have scattered about my computer.  These are all mostly instrumentals from cds that are very difficult to find in the US so while I am all for supporting the bands your best bet is to download these from audiogalaxy.  Also it allows you to make some sweet compolations.  Alright here we go.

All the musical scores by Danny Elfman.  For thouse of you who aren't movie score nuts he did the music for Edward Sissor Hands and the Nightmare Before Christmas.  The man is bloody brilliant and the music is perfect for this game.  His uses of the xylophone combinted with short little notes give it a simple childlike air along with brooding inner darkness.  Sorry I am an Elfman fan.

Burzum.  This is an extreamly hit or miss black metal band you have to be a very special person to apreciate thier lyrical preformances.  however thier instrumentals are stunning.  I got the better one's listed here
Balferd Balders
Channeling the Power of Souls
Den Onde Kysten
Dungeons of Darkness
Gebrechlickeit II (this song is a bit heavyer than the one's listed but it is good)
Han Som Reiste
Hermodr a Helferd (one of my favorite insturmentals by them)
IIIa Tidandi
Tomhet
There should be more Burzum...I'm sure of it I seem to be missing a few songs from my computer.  Oh well when I find the rest I'll put them on a web page somehwere now onto misc other bands.

Dimmu Borgir- Fear and Wonder
Kronos Quartet- Already it is dark
Kronos Quartet- Arvo Part- Pslom
Kronos Quartet- Black Angels-Departure
Kronos Quartet- Black Angels-Return (this song is just scary as hell all by itself...utter scilence with some feint notes then out of no where...god I love to put it on and make people jump.)
Requiem for a Dream sound track...all of 2 traks wouldn't do as backgound music for this game.  This is also by the Kronos Quartet
Lastly they covered the murder music from psycho so you might want to grab that too.  NOTE:  Thier song names are irritateingly long and complicated.  So these are from the list of Mp3's that I have, it should be enough to point you in the right direction.  

Opeth- Madrigal
Opeth- Orchid
Opeth- Patterns in the Ivy
Opeth-Silhouette

Peccatum- An Ovation to art
Peccatum- Where do I belong

Just about anything by Sopor Aeternus.  Okay yes most of their songs have lyrics but they are just to freekin creepy to leave off this list in any form.,  If I did play music for the background for my games it would be Sopor Aeternus and Kronos Quartet all the way.


Thou Shalt Suffer- all of the somnium's (there are ten)

Wongraven~ Det var engang ett menneske
wongraven~ fra fjelltronen
wongraven- opp under fjellet toner en sang


Alright that's it.  As another background idea, there is this art house film I own called Begotten.  It is a lot like a 90 minut NIN video.  Anyway put that on and turn the volume up(there is very little sound) and just have it in the back ground.  The images in this movie are of a highly surealistic and vaugly disturbing nature.  After watching it I felt disorented and lost, curiouse as to what I had just seen.  Haveing it run in the back ground is just creepy and mentaly unhealthy.

Haveing spent a couple of hours compiling all of this I have to ask everyone, dose it really help?  Do all the props, music, stunts and knick knacks really help?  The few times I've tried them out I've gotten nothing but mixed results.  Sometimes the props prooved to be brutaly effective while other times they were ignored by the players and the play group.  On that same note on still other times they didn't need props at all of any sort.  After awhile I abandoned the idea, dismissing it as a distraction and to much work for me to be bothered with.  However if a buntch of other peole have sucess with it let me know.  Cause right now to me it seems like the group is really on and into it or off and no amount of props can really change that.

[Mike Holmes]

Props are fun, successful or no.

Bach's Cannon and Fugue (or is it tocatta and Fugue, I always forget) in D minor. On a cathedral organ, of course. The original scarry music, and still the best.

Mike

[Paganini]

Bach's Cannon and Fugue (or is it tocatta and Fugue, I always forget) in D minor. On a cathedral organ, of course. The original scarry music, and still the best.

It is tocatta. And if you want scary *classical* stuff, here's what you want:

(You can get all of this stuff on CD anthologies from amazon called things like Haloween Pops and Classics from the Crypt. Classics from the Crypt is an excellent CD, with big name performers. Great bargain.)

Bach: Toccata & Fuge in D
Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre
Gounod: Funeral March of a Marionette
Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain (Possibly the scarriest)
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique - March to the Scaffold
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique - Dream of a Witches' Sabbath (another really good one)
Grieg: "Peer Gynt" Suite No. 1 - In the Hall of the Mountain King (of course)
Liszt: Mephisto Waltz
Dukas: Sorcerer's Apprentice (of course of course)

[Petter Sandelin]

Wow! Mentioning Wongraven gets my attention. There are two more tracks on the record fjellletronen:

Over odemark
Tiden er en stenig grav

both pretty decent. And check out this thread about props music etc.

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=363

One last tip for music is look for good soundtracks to games. I use Alien vs Predator and Quake quite often.

[peteramthor]

I tend to use more commercially available music.  Mainly because there isn't a good music store anywhere near me in this rural hell I live in.

I have used.

Hellraiser 1 and 2 soundtracks.
The Professional and Aliens soundtracks.

Also a little bit of classical.

I also recorded some of the static noise and such from silent hill using a friends stereo/tv/video game system set up.  That seemed to work well also.

[Grave Boy 13]

Hi all.  This is my first post here as I had just found the board last night.  I have only ran two sessions of Little Fears so far, but this weekend will make three.  I've had the game since March but it had taken me a little while to get a game group together who was willing to try something new.  However, after only one session, they were hooked.  I had seen in many places on this forum where atmosphere had been mentioned several times and great suggestions had been made on how to set up the perfect atmosphere for the game.  One thing, however, seems to have been overlooked... which just happens to be the one thing that won my group over... the simple statement "Remember when...".

Many suggestions had been made on how to make a great spooky atmosphere for the game, but one thing that I have found to be even more helpful in getting the players into the right and proper mindset is to simply remind them of their own childhood's.  In my groups case, we are mostly kids of the 80's (ya, I know, what the hell are we doing still playing games at our age... what can I say, were big geeks).  We woke up to Cindy Lauper on the radio, watched He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers, and Voltron after school, listened to Madonna tell her father that she's gonna keep her baby, and watched as Michael Jackson danced about with zombies in a cemetery.  Because of this, we all felt that the best setting for our game would be the 80's.  There just seems to be a big difference between players enthusiastically proclaiming that they are going home to watch Transformers as opposed to Pokiemon (that and before we decided that it should be set in the 80's, the players kept accidentally making references to Voltron, My Little Pony, Robotech, etc...).  

To help with the setting and to really send my players minds back a couple of decades, I put together several music comps which are primarily composed of various 80's new wave bands (Bannaramma, Cindy Lauper, Madonna, OMD, Boy George, Ah Ha, Depech Mode, Makita, etc).  To help with the "remember when..." quality of the atmosphere, I put on a lot of samples and theme music from various cartoons and TV shows from the 80's as well (Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Dungeons & Dragons, Transformers, He-Man, GI Joe, Shera, Smurfs, The A-Team, The Real Ghostbusters, etc...).  Finally, to add a healthy splash of darkness across the whole scene, I mixed in various Darkwave and classic Gothrock tracks since the old gothrock and darkwave mixes so perfectly with the old 80's new wave.  Some of the best bands I found for this are: Switchblade Symphony, The Machine in the Garden, The Sisters of Mercy (especially the song Cry Little Sister), Siouxsie and the Banshees (especially Carousel), Abny Park, etc.  The best out of the lot, and one I would highly recommend as they go beautifully with the over all feel of Little Fears would be Switchblade Symphony, especially the album Bread and Jam for Francis.  It has three songs which almost sound as if they should be the theme songs for Little Fears: Monsters, Witches, and Fear.  Over all, Switchblade Symphony has a dark and brooding sound with a very child like quality which fits beautifully into the game.

In essence, I think what I have tried to say in this rather long rambling post is simply this: don't under estimate the power of reminiscence.  If you are having trouble getting your players into the right frame of mind or are even looking for a way to submerse the group even further into the world, try setting the game in the time when the bulk of your players would have been kids and get as much memorabilia from that time as you can.  You will be astounded as to the results when you simply ask your players to "remember when..."

[Jason L Blair]

First off, welcome Grave Boy.

In essence, I think what I have tried to say in this rather long rambling post is simply this: don't under estimate the power of reminiscence.  

<snip>

You will be astounded as to the results when you simply ask your players to "remember when..."

This is great advice and something I recommend to people in person.

[Valamir]

Hey Grave...don't forget My Buddy and Teddy Ruxpin.  One of my first images of Little Fears was thinking about some kids "My Buddy" actually starting to "climb up a tree" and "going any where he goes"...by itself.

Or when the players realize that what little Teddy Ruxpin is saying isn't on the cassette tape they have in him.

The 80s is a gold mine for this sort of thing...technology was just starting to find its way into toys...that in itself was a little freaky.

Just imagine what the little girls collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls might smell like after closet land gets through with them...

I can just imagine pulling the string on the See and Say and instead of hearing "Cows go mooo" they hear "I'm coming to get yooou"