How I Find Music for My D&D Games

Music is one of my favorite ways to add atmosphere to a D&D session, but it can be hard to find the perfect tracks to match the scenes at your table. If you're looking for music for your next D&D campaign, here are some of the places I'd start.

1. Music actually made for D&D and TTRPGs

Let's start with the obvious one. There are some fantastic composers and creators making music and ambience specifically for tabletop RPGs. YouTube is probably the easiest place to start.

Two of my favorites are Michael Ghelfi Studios and Bardify.

Michael Ghelfi Studios has an enormous library of TTRPG music, ambience, and sound effects covering everything from taverns and forests to dungeons and battlefields.

Bardify is another great rabbit hole. A lot of their tracks are already organized around situations a DM would actually be looking for: Suspense, Tense Negotiations, Long Rest, Investigating a Mystery, Heist, Dungeons & Crypts, combat, and so on.

2. Video game soundtracks

This is probably my biggest source of D&D music. Video game music has one enormous advantage: it's already designed to sit behind what you're doing without completely taking over. Games often need music for exactly the same situations we encounter in D&D: exploring a city, wandering through the wilderness, entering a dungeon, talking to someone important, or fighting a horrifying boss.

There are some obvious gold mines:

• The Elder Scrolls / Skyrim — exploration, towns, wilderness
• The Witcher — darker fantasy and combat
• Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring — bosses, horror, and big dramatic encounters
• The Legend of Zelda — adventure, exploration, towns, whimsical moments
• Hollow Knight — beautiful atmospheric and melancholy music
• Castlevania — gothic fantasy and horror
• Sea of Thieves — nautical adventures

I especially like matching the world of the game to the world of the campaign. Running Curse of Strahd? Go digging through Castlevania and Bloodborne. Running a nautical campaign? Try Sea of Thieves. Need something for a huge, terrifying boss fight? FromSoftware has spent the last 15 years solving that problem for you.

And don't limit yourself to the original soundtrack. Games sometimes have orchestral arrangements, anniversary albums, remixes, acoustic versions, and other interpretations that can completely change how a familiar melody feels. 

3. Movies and TV

Same basic idea as video games: pay attention to music when you're watching things. If a scene makes you feel tense, triumphant, uncomfortable, sad, or excited, the score is probably doing some of that work. And you can steal that feeling for your D&D game.

Fantasy is obviously fertile ground—Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones come up frequently in DM recommendations—but don't constrain yourself. Some soundtracks from Marvel (e.g. The Avengers or Captain America) are a great fit for combat because their brasses and heroic tones make the players feel like heroes, rather than making every fight sound dark and terrifying.

4. Classical and folk music

You also have a few hundred years of music to steal from. Classical and orchestral music can be fantastic for D&D, particularly for big dramatic scenes, royal courts, villains, battles, tragedies, or anything else where you want the session to feel appropriately grand.

Folk and traditional music can be even more fun. Irish and Celtic music is an obvious fit for a lot of high-fantasy settings, but look beyond that too. Indian classical and folk music, Japanese traditional music, Chinese traditional music, Middle Eastern music, Nordic folk—the world has an absurd amount of musical tradition to explore. This is also a great way to make different places in your world actually feel different.

Just be thoughtful about how you're using culturally specific music. “This culture’s music sounds compelling and inspires this particular part of my world” is a much better starting point than reducing an entire culture to a fantasy stereotype.

5. Build your music collection over time, not just when you need it

Don't just sit down the night before your session and Google “epic D&D battle music.” When you're playing a game, watching a movie, browsing YouTube, or listening to something completely unrelated to D&D, pay attention. 

If you hear a great piece of music or ambience and immediately think “this would be perfect for D&D”, save it in a tool like My D&D Music. You might not know where you're going to use it yet. That's fine. Build up a collection over time and eventually you'll have your own soundtrack to pull from.

One last tip: search for extended versions

Once you find something you like, try searching for an extended version (e.g. “1 hour version”).

A lot of popular game and movie tracks have longer edits or loops available online. They're incredibly useful at the table because you don't have to stop what you're doing every three minutes to pick another song.

Sometimes you'll also find edits that loop the best section of a track, remove an intro that doesn't work as well in the background, or otherwise turn a great piece of music into something much easier to use during a session.

For example, I love the music from phase 2 of the Starscourge Radahn fight in the game Elden Ring. But I don’t want to play the whole Radahn fight music just to focus on a specific part of it. So I found this video that took out the best part of the music track (in my opinion) and extended it into a 30 minute loop. And then I played it during a session while my players fought the boss of the dungeon I was running. 

Happy listening, good luck, and may all your rolls be Nat 20s!