Prepping For A Session With Bardic Tools - By Unknown Peal
Borja's Note: This was written by Unknown Peal, a community member who kindly documented his experiences using Bardic Tools for their games. I'm eternally grateful to them, hope it's useful for you!
Ambience is a pretty big part of cultivating an atmosphere, a mystique of sorts when setting up a session I feel like. Whether you’re in person and you can change the lighting, or you’re virtual and can change the themes of your webpages, you wanna make things feel varied, and unique. I find that the right sounds make a big difference. So unless you’re totally winging it (which has been done, and there are options for that), here’s a couple ways to get audio ready for a session in under an hour.
Option 1: Repurpose an existing scene.
This is… super easy. The scenes and sounds are ALL drag-and-drop, so you just pop them right in, and you can add and delete whatever noises you want. Nothing is set to a certain scene, or unremovable. You can even rename them to fully customize the experience for yourself. You just pick one and set it out on your SoundBoard, then you can listen to it, customize volumes, and throw a couple extra noises in there for some extra pizzazz and flair.
ETA: 10-15 minutes
Option 2: Tag-based Scenery
This one is also pretty easy.
You know you want something tense, or maybe something creepy, or something Epic!
You just pick your vibe, or where you’re at. You want a seedy tavern, something sort of creepy and edgy. Dark and creepy are tags, tavern is a tag, and you can throw the people tag in there. (Borja's note: You can add your own tags to sounds you like!)
You scroll through your sounds and, after you’ve created a new custom scene along the bottom, stick them in each of the 3 sections. They all have designated ones they ‘belong’ to, but you can stick them wherever! An effect can be ambience, ambience can be music. It’s totally customizable. But each section does have different behaviors. Effects, when played, are a single-time usage of a track. You can customize how loud it is. Music plays once by default and then moves to the next track, but can be set to loop. After it runs out of tracks, it stops. Only one music plays at a time. Ambience, all noises are playing together on a constant loop, and they can be turned on or off.
ETA: 20-30 minutes
Option 3: Good ol’ fashioned scrolling.
This is the best way to find a weird noise that might be just what you’re looking for, but it’s also the most time consuming.
Just… scroll. Go through all the sounds you got time for, and just see what sort of amazing, weird stuff you can produce. You can make ‘Blacksmith Ambience’ out to be some sort of assembly line machinery, or ‘Goblin Growls’ are actually some form of Corn Cutie snarling. But this is obviously gonna take the most of your time, as you just sit down, and give a listen. (Borja's note: If you find a song you really like, add it to your Favorites!)
I guarantee this won’t be a waste though, because some of these noises are truly special, and kind of grotesque at times if we’re being real. But hey, that could be the goal. There’s enough variety for whatever. It’s very similar to option 2, there’s just not nearly all the same sorting fun to condense things. This is how I made ‘Cave Depths’ below, for a cave encounter with some skeletons my players had.
ETA: 45-60 minutes.
-- Unknown Peal
Borja again: Thank you Unknown for writing this up! You've been so enthusiastic in the community, it's super energizing!