Music

Live music adds a huge amount of atmosphere to a game. Not only that, it can be used as a device to inject information for both plot and immersion purposes, and finally, music and storytelling provides a way to immortalise characters and to increase their lasting impact on the game world. The purpose of this section of the wiki is to encourage live performances of appropriate music and stories and to provide guidance and resources to create a different style of music for each nation. No IC music is discouraged, these resources are just suggestions. We hope it will help musicians and performers to bring alive their camps and add a great deal to the immersion of the game as a whole.

Please note, we are being very careful to credit all tunes and lyrics here. Please do not upload copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the authors/performers. Want to submit music to this resource? Here is a music template page to help you.

• Brass Coast Music
• Dawn Music
• Highguard Music
• League Music
• Marches Music
• Navarri Music
• Urizen Music
• Varushka Music
• Wintermark Music

Songs known throughout the Empire

• Imperial Anthem - known across the Empire, though sung in different styles
• The Good Old Way - hymn about The Way, medium
• Daddy Fox - folk song about a cunning fox, easy.
• Three Ravens/Twa Corbies - song about a dead knight, medium.
• The Parting Glass - farewell song, medium.
• Here's A Health to the Company - easy drinking song.

Music in battle

Most of the Imperial nations will use music or noise to inspire courage on the battlefield, or to terrify their enemies. Styles vary from nation to nation and group to group, however here are some overall tendencies:

• Brass Coast - favour wild shouting and shrieking, along with taunts and challenges or structured 'marching music' on pipes/recorders with light drumming. They build up courage by typically starting in a very slow beat that gets faster and faster until it dissolves into chaos, then starting again.
• Dawn - a Dawnish shield wall may be accompanied by formal fanfare, or pipe and drum. Individual units are often accompanied by a Troubadour, who maintains the morale of the soldiers through story and song, and who is also responsible for immortalising their deeds at the battle's end.
• Highguard - Highguard has a tradition of battle choirs, or unstructured bugles/trumpets/horns at the charge
• The League - League soldiers love to taunt their enemies and often chant simple rhyming jeers at opposing soldiers.
• The Marches - in a similar fashion to Rough Music, Marchers will shout, chant, bang shields, staves or anything else to create noise before a battle. When marching to the battlefield, drinking songs may also help to keep spirits up!
• Navarr - in order to distract foes from potential flanking ambushes, the Navarr may shout and chant, and use small horns and drums to create unstructured noise, or bullroarers or 'twirlies'/'whirlers' to scare and disorient their enemies.
• Urizen - gongs, bells and drums are used, to provide a steady repeating rhythm which keeps the troops moving forwards.
• Varushka - Varushkans often sing morale-boosting Marching songs, and can be accompanied on the battlefield by drums but typically forget about any kind of structured music once the fighting starts.
• Wintermark - A Wintermark battle line will have orators, drummers, singers, or pipers gathered around the Banner of each group and they play a large role in keeping morale up. See Wintermark Military Concerns for more detail.
• Orcs - big drums, chanting, haka, horns

General Music Resources

• For song lyrics: Mudcat, traditionalmusic.co.uk
• For tunes: TheSession
• To find vaguely religious lyrics about the virtues, try using the word search at http://fasola.org/indexes/1991/?l=a You can search by words e.g. Ambition or "The Way" and then click through to the whole song. To find the tune, try googling the song title as many shape note songs are on youtube, or find a friendly shape note singer who can look up the tune in the book.
• Shakespeare sonnets are suiitable for a few cultures, especially Dawn, or for filking. http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/all.php