Author: hkokko

Name Hannu Kokko Profession a software development leader, currently working at Elisa as Head of Software Product Development, Smart Energy Solutions. As a secondary occupation a Principal Consultant at Kohilleen Consulting - RD leadership consultancy business. In working life Working in large scale agile software development and architecture are close to my heart and practiced daily. Large scale here is anything involving dozens of teams working for the same release. Continuous integration as a cornerstone of making agile development feasible and to help keep the rhythm has been in my focus for quite a bit. In private life I enjoy photography and seeing new places and cultures.

GM Tool tips : Music and sounds

iPad can be a useful tool for GM. One of my favorite programs there is Soundboard.

Soundboard is basically a DJ tool for mixing sound sources. This can be good for evoking a bit of atmosphere to your game. Create a playlist in iTunes for appropriate music  depending on the stories or encounters you have. In Soundboard create one or more soundboards for the music.  Import the playlist as a whole to individual soundboard – you can have 32 songs per soundboard visible. Name the soundboard so you can easily find it.

Purchase or create some sound effects for example. There are quite a few commercial ones available from iTunes or Paizo website. Create new soundboards for the effects for example – drumming,  ghostly sounds, combat etc.

During the game select from soundboard good background music for your particular situation, for example something from Lord of The Rings, Ennio Morricone, Epic Score or Midnight Syndicate.  When you need sound effects just flip to the soundboard that contains the proper effects and click on each one you like to play for example growling and combat sounds. The advantages of Soundboard are that you do not need to search and click on iTunes playlists and that you can play effects, even multiple effects on top of each other and background music.

If you need more volume than iPad speakers supply, you can connect the iPad either to a stereo system wireless or to external speakers via bluetooth. Usually the iPad speakers are enough.

Campaign Mastery has a good article on creating the mood.

 

Return to Glorantha

This blog is occasional notes about roleplaying and gamemastering. The notes mostly concern gaming in Greg Staffords’ fantasy world of Glorantha.

We kickstarted our Glorantha campaign for its belated 30 year anniversary.  We did a detour for awhile running Glorantha with Herowars rules but players never really got enthusiastic about that system. After an interlude of running Call of Chthulhu I purchased the Mongoose Publishing’s RQ II rules and we returned to Pavis last December.

MRQ2 is a clean, enjoyable set of rules . Combat system with Combat actions and maneuvers is a lot more colorful than it used to be with old RQ rules.

There probably has never been a better time to get Gloranthan background material than now as DriveThruRPG has a large selection of them as PDFs at discount.

Moon Design Publishing is going to come out with Pavis supplement end of January and Design Mechanism is promising their RQ 6 ruleset both to be compatible with MRQ2 and available soon…

I am back home in Glorantha and it feels good.