The crackling of flames and the soft notes from a lute will have a calming effect on your heroes at the nightly campsite. The traffic noise in the city or the harsh guitar riffs from the Rock Club on the other hand will paint a very different picture. Music and ambient sounds capture the essence of places and situations. They are important elements for your games—and thanks to YARPS you don’t have to search for the appropriate files for each scene anymore. YARPS automatically generates playlists for your scenes and moods according to your preferences.
For many players, the right music is an important element for their game experience. Maybe you have an iconic opening that already sets expectations with its first few notes. Maybe there’s a specific theme that runs through your campaign like a golden thread whenever your players’ nemesis makes an appearance. Or soft, melancholic sounds remind your heroes of their distant homes. Many game masters go to great lengths in their preparations to find the appropriate music for memorable moments like these. At the same time, you’ll need more general background music or sound effects to accompany your game sessions. From emotionally charged rhythms to accentuate your battles to the gurgling of a small stream and the singing of birds to illustrate a peaceful journey, and the quiet tune a bard could be playing in a tavern, together with murmurs and the clunking of beer mugs—the right music will make your games truly come alive.
Carefully selecting every single track and creating playlists can be a lot of work—at least if you don’t want to use the same playlists over and over again. With its dynamic links, YARPS offers a new approach to suggest suitable music and ambient sounds individually for every scene. Upon the setup of the music files in your collection, no matter whether they’re stored locally on your computer or streamed from the web, you’ll enter certain attributes like the associated mood for each of them. You then link the track to locations, characters, factions, or any other suitable entities from your Encyclopedia.
When you create a scene and fill it with relevant entities, such as the location, characters, etc., YARPS automatically creates an individual playlist for this scene from the sound files linked to those entities. YARPS will also analyze which other sound files from your collection could be a good fit according to these linked entities and will compile them in a playlist as well. If, for example, your scene takes place in a new location that belongs to the same region and has the same cultural traits as a city you’ve played in before, YARPS will automatically suggest music files that are linked to this city. Of course, you can expand, shorten, or change the playlists generated this way. For instance, if you enter a different mood, you’ll get different suggestions. The more you use YARPS for the selection of your music and sound files, the better its automatic suggestions will fit in with your preferences. You’ll have to adjust fewer and fewer files manually.
