A full orchestra - in your pocket!

Whether you’re leading a party of adventurers through rowdy taverns or a treacherous dungeon, it’s important to set the right mood. One of the easiest way to create the right atmosphere at your table is with the perfect soundtrack. We’ve recently discovered Pocket Bard, and it’s quickly becoming our favourite tool to use when running adventures!

Pocket Bard is an app available on iOS and Android full of music to suit any adventure. Currently you can access the ‘Fantasy Essentials’ bundle, with Sci-Fi, Sea-faring and Tavern Essentials currently being created. Within the Fantasy essentials you can find music for a range of scenes, from towns and cities, to forests and dungeons, to mountains and swamps!

Once you’ve found the setting you need, you can then pick your music type: Explore, Combat, or Victory. Each setting has a track for these three options, depending where you are in your adventure. Walking through the forest, admiring the wildlife? Explore is perfect for you. Suddenly, a bugbear charges through the trees full of anger and fear? Time to start that Combat music! And then for that moment your heroes emerge triumphant from their fight, you can press the Victory button. The music will seamlessly move from the Combat music into a glorious fanfare that perfectly encapsulates feeling victorious, before gradually moving you back into the calmer Explore music without so much as a pause. Being able to swell the music without having to change tracks or pause to find a new song really makes your players feel like they’re in an action movie, their moment of glory uninterrupted.

Within the Explore and Battle music, there is even more choices to craft the ultimate soundtrack for your game. There are 3 sliding scales within each setting - Intensity, Ambience and Weather. You can fine tune each of these settings to your exact needs. You can stroll through a village with low intensity music, adding gentle sounds of wind blowing past and a river running in the distance.

Or for a dungeon crawl, choose high intensity music with crashes of thunder and an eerie chorus of whispers. You can adjust these anytime, so if your journey starts low intensity but as your adventurers move through things get more challenging for your heroes, you can slide up the intensity scale and the music will effortlessly adjust.

And of course, Pocket Bard has even thought of those single sounds that can really immerse you in the scene. There is a section of ‘One-Shots’ full of one of sounds like a town bell ringing, a spell being thrown, and explosions both large and small!

If you’ve adventured as much as we have, you soon learn that all the planning in the world won’t mean you know exactly how a session is going to run. One unexpected decision or choice can mean that the atmosphere of your game changes almost instantly, and you need to be able to adapt just as quickly. No one wants to be searching their playlist in a panic for a new song to fit the mood, all the while your players are losing focus and losing that sense of immersion in your world. Pocket Bard means you can adjust your soundtrack as quickly as the dice rolls, ready to suit any outcome. Game Masters are often already juggling so many things, choosing and managing audio for your games can be stressful.

Pocket Bard makes a flawless soundtrack something accessible for any GM, and we love it!

You can download Pocket Bard on iOS and Android, and you can support them on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/PocketBard196