tabletopaudio

New Ambience: Halfling Sneak

Greetings Patrons,

After designing the background sounds of a castle on high alert I couldn't get the idea of a thief darting among the shadows, avoiding detection, out of my head. After working on the music for a while and finding it leaning toward a more light-hearted vibe, I imagined the...

New Ambience: The Great Lift

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track started from a set-piece idea about a clifftop castle, market, civilization etc. that had only one point of access. Over millennia a massive system of platform lifts was built and added on to. This was essentially a vertical rail that ferried passengers ...

New Ambience: Terraforming

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track features the classic sci-fi trope of terraforming, the process by which a lifeless planet is transformed into one that can sustain life. I have no idea how this works but it my head it requires a massive complex of hissing and clanking machines, belching...

New Ambience: Descent

Greetings Patrons,

I considered calling this track "50 feet of Rope". I also considered never telling anyone that. But, here we are!

Descent is an adventure/mystery/tension/what-have-you type of track. I tried to create something that was intriguing, rather than scary. Daring...

New Ambience: Through the Woods

Greetings Patrons,

I've had this track on the back burner for several weeks. I'd bring it out and tinker with it, and then put it away again as it never seemed to click. The working title was "surdo_thing" (a large Brazilian bass drum). A few days ago, frustrated, I removed the surdo, and I...

New Ambience: Voyage Begins

Greetings Patrons,

Here is another one of my liminal spaces ambiences. This track centers around a busy dock where workers are loading a ship in preparation for a long voyage. The sounds are of ropes hoisting, carts arriving with produce, livestock, and fresh water. As the workers prepare t...

New Ambience: Rise of the Golem

Edit: The attached files were missing their id3 tags so have been re-uploaded. If you downloaded these prior to 26 July, 2023 you should re-download. The files themselves are unchanged. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a magical, supernatural-vibed track about the creation of ...

New Ambience: Hall of Angels

Greetings Patrons,

I have a notebook that I keep by my desk that had the word "statues" written on the open page. It was circled. I don't remember writing it, but - if I circle anything, that usually means something to future me.

From the idea of the statue, I started sketching out a ...

New Ambience: Infernal Machine

Greetings Patrons,

Here's a steampunk setpiece that should be equally at home in fantasy, or gritty sci-fi. "Infernal Machine" is an impenetrable mass of gears, cogs, pistons, and whatsits all grinding away for some mysterious purpose. 

The ambience, as the name implies, is full ...

New Ambience: Den of Iniquity

Greetings Patrons,

I should start by assuring everyone that this particular house of ill repute is quite tame on the baudiness scale. That being said, if your characters need a tavern that is a little seedier, a little looser, this might be the place for you. (There's a small bench outside ...

New Ambience: Whirlpool

Greetings Patrons,

Well, what started with a single low-strings ostinato somehow turned into a manic, slightly stressful extended action sequence. 

A ship at sea is being drawn, inexorably, into a massive whirling vortex. 

Musically this is quite dense. A lot of moveme...

New Ambience: Awakenings

Greetings Patrons,

I'm a big fan of scoring particular moments, just like I would do if I was writing to picture. The challenge for me in creating Tabletop Audio tracks is always to come up with the scene. I feel like I need to create the film, or at least a scene before I can start scoring...

New Ambience: Troll Grotto

Greetings Patrons,

For this week's track, I imagined a massive Nordic troll nestled in his cave and surrounded by bones and trinkets. Settings like this a great for set pieces in which the story revolves around sneaking in or out, stealing an item, or perhaps something more dastardly.

New Ambience: Ghosts of Appalachia

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track evolved rather organically from a simple breathy vocal ambience to a derelict mountain shack in wintertime. As I played with the vocals - both melodic and non-melodic I created kind of a 'sound bath' - meaning there's nothing distinct in terms of melody,...

New Ambience: Rope Bridge

Greetings Patrons,

A quick preface to say that I forgot to add id3 tags to last week's track, Roc's Nest. I've re-uploaded the files so you can download them again if that's important to you.

Now, for this ...

New Ambience: Roc's Nest

Edit 24, May 2023: I mistakenly left out the id3 tags on the attached mp3 files, I have re-uploaded them with the proper tags. The file contents is unchanged.

Greetings Patrons,

My thinking behind this was to do a kind of Bernard Herrmann-esque track, full of dissonance and s...

New SoundPad: Ancient Greece

Edit: May 19, 2023: This is live on the site now, so share away!

Greetings Patrons,

Here is the 32nd installment of the SoundPad series, "Ancient Greece".

This was an interesting project because classical antiquity, medieval Europe, and fantasy all share many similar th...

New Ambience: Trail of Ashes

Greetings Patrons,

As a fan of in-between moments in stories, I created this army in motion. These are foot soldiers, no fancy officers on horseback. Whatever country, whatever year this was, these were the grunts. 

The 'action' takes place on a blustery, gray landscape. The once...

New Ambience: River of Blood

Greetings Patrons,

Once again, I found myself in a position where the music for this was almost completely finished and I found myself asking; "cool, but what is it?" I'm not sure how I landed on the idea for a river of blood, but it could very likely be that as I was looking over my sugges...

New Ambience: Starship Adrift

Greeting Patrons,

I'm back from my quick trip to the North Carolina mountains. I spent most of the time sitting on the porch watching birds and identifying them with my new favorite app, Merlin. I also dragged the family with me for a tour of the Moog synthesizer factory in Asheville, which...

New Ambience: Rolling Emporium

Greetings Patrons,

I had this idea for a set piece/drop-in scenario that was based somewhat on the Wandering Emporium from the D&D book, Descent into Avernus. The concept was that instead of a caravan of motorized vehicles, the entire market fit onto an enormous wagon, pulled by a massi...

New Ambience: Ancient Beacon

Greetings Patrons,

I began this piece with the rising and falling glissando synth line and thought it sounded pretty grand on its own, but I kept adding parts to it: children's choir, regular choir, and another synth. Eventually, it became this cool undulating motif that made me think of ri...

New Ambience: Pit Fighter

Greetings Patrons,

This is the story of a fighter, so confident in their ability that they decided to derail the entire plot of your story, just so they could enter a winner-take-all, one-on-one competition in the underground pit fighting circuit.

Or something like that...

This ...

New Ambience: Skull Island

Edit: The music only track somehow contained ambience so it was replaced on 21 March, 2023.

Greetings Patrons,

I guess I was in the mood for old-school Hollywood adventure this week. I do love expository music in film, especially fantasy and sci-fi. I find it works particular...

New Ambience: Egg Chamber

Greetings Patrons,

This week's ambience features all manner of slime, ooze, and gore. Or, to be precise, stewed tomatoes, eggshells, and mac & cheese. It's a standard sci-fi horror set piece but could easily be repurposed for fantasy.

For me, Egg Chamber was about finding...

New Ambience: Promontory

Greetings Patrons,

I was noodling around on the piano this week and this little melody came up that reminded me of a solitary figure looking out over the ocean from a rocky cliff. In my 'head movie', it was night, the sky was ominous, but it wasn't gloomy. It was more Jane Austen than Bram ...

New Ambience: Adventure Begins

Greetings Patrons,

This week's track is designed as an opening credits style piece. It's part 'title theme' and part expository.  In a film or tv opening, this would be accompanied by images to introduce the viewer to the world. Here, the setting is described by the ambient sound desig...

New Ambience: Hydroponics Bay

Greetings Patrons,

I've always loved the idea of greenhouses on spaceships. From the 1972 film "Silent Running", to "Sunshine" (2007), to "Passengers" (2016). Even if the film isn't about growing plants specifically, I love the idea of a space for growing food or cultivating alien botany.&n...

New Ambience: Warlock's Whisper

Greetings Patrons,

The original save file for this track was called something like: Feb_2023_orch_magic_thing. I do this a lot. My working folder is full of snippets that I come back to, or not. Some of them warrant a "hey, this isn't terrible, why did I stop working on this?" Othe...

New Ambience: Spirit of the Plains

Greetings Patrons,

After last week's dark action track, I thought I'd do something a bit more atmospheric. Once again, I've chosen an image by one of my favorite fantasy artists Grandfailure as the basis for the score.

Spirit of the Plains is a bit of Miyazaki and maybe even ...