Soundtrack- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Soundtrack- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

One of the gamer-friendly things I got for my birthday was the soundtrack for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. I love orchestral theme music, mainly for its in-game applications. I prefer to lay out an “in-game” soundtrack for my games ahead of time to play as needed for select situations. Ok, I love putting together game soundtracks and having the action, narration or story-telling of a RPG match music playing in the back ground.

All of the tracks on this album are short, so by itself this is not an album to just leave play in the background as its moods and feelings will vary from the content of your game and the soundtrack goes on. It is however great to cherry pick content from.

Below is the Track/Name/Duration/ My (and my wife’s) thoughts on how you could the music in game

1)Fog Bound (2:17) My wife thinks this is a great track for a renaissance style game and it feels like the TV show the Tutors at the Start. I think it’s a great track for a reoccurring theme to associate with a location, such as a group’s base of operations.

2)The Medallion Calls (1:53) My wife says robust traveling music, I see more of a panoramic description of a city (especially with a harbor).

3) The Black Pearl (2:17) Wife sees Cliff side action, perhaps swords fighting on the cliff's edge. I see ships chasing ships on the high-sea, but secretly agree with my wife.

4)Will and Elizabeth (2:08) Not a bad piece to follow up track three with, as it flows together nicely. Continuation of the same imagery about, but perhaps with some horse-chase action or it could be “the hunt” music in some situations.

5)Swords Crossed (3:16) This could be the sinister ritual that the PC’s interrupt, mid chant/mid-sacrifice. I see worshipers all around some sort of altar.

6)Walk the Plank (1:59) This music starts with a big bad sinister otherworldly evil, and just mellows out. For my wife, the beginning is too heavy for the rest of the piece. It ties together a lot of the feeling of the “Fog bound” piece as it mellows out, so the two pieces could be tied together as a campaign progresses and the evil nature of the themed item from track one is revealed.

7)Barbossa is Hungry (4:06) Something about this makes me think of a against-all odds group of heroes preparing for an battle against an overwhelming evil that they cannot possibly win, but yet must.

8)Blood Ritual (3:33) This could be played as the heroes travel through the evil overlords great castle, or on the way to stop the sacrifice from track 5.

9)Moonlight Serenade (2:09) Ahhh… all is back to normal back in town, evil has been defeated and all is well…. UNTIL THE AGENT OF EVIL IS DISCOVERED.

10)To the Pirates' Cave! (3:31) Yes.. this is sinister evil cave music. Caves full of action and swashbuckling!

11)Skull and Crossbones (3:24) An action piece, you can cast this as almost any action sequence. Its generic action.

12)Bootstrap's Bootstraps (2:39) The sinister plan of evil unfolds, its hidden servants come out to do their overlord’s bidding.

13)Underwater March (4:13) The world above the waves (or below) is so quiet and peaceful, until broken by the feet of a marching patrol or army. It’s a “peace” into “war march” song that might fit well with narration about how a war first started.

14)One Last Shot (4:46) The heroes come home, victorious and peace has been restored.
He's a Pirate (1:31) This is too closely link to the movie to separate, so it’s a must in any sailing game, but leave it back at port for any other genre.

I would not say this is a must-own album. If you happen to like the movie, or happen to collect soundtracks like I do, it’s worth having, however not worth going out of your way for. You really need to tie tracks from this album in with tracks from other albums in order for it to be worthwhile and not REEK of pirates.

PCGen

Right after we converted to the official version of the Pathfinder RPG I was looking around for a nice character generator/character management tool that supported the updated rules set.

For a number of years I’ve been using Heroforge and all it’s related sub-sheet with great success. The “SCoreGen” and “adVance” sheets were great, but all work off the beta rules. Now I know there wasn’t a lot that had changed between beta and the final version, but when my brother needed a pregen character because he wrote his PC out of the story for the day**, we realized just how much had changed with barbarians when the whole “rage points” sheet printed out for Mr. Turok *EARTHBREAKER*.

After Cyruscon, I setout to find another character generator that was updated for Pathfinder, and found only one: PCGen (you must download the pathfinder dataset seperatly)

I’ve used a much earlier version of PCGen but gave it up for Heroforge, but thought I would give PCGen another shot. Turns out I’m still not happy with it.

It’s a sourceforge project, and I really like to support collaborative open source software. However, it’s a sourceforge project…. and that often means that there is some extra fiddling with it to make it work.

I didn’t like my experience with using PCGen for Pathfinder because:

• Clunky interface to define the rule sets in use.
• Some issues with not calculating things correctly (like BAB for a cleric/fighter)
  OW! MY EYES (this isn’t the 90s)
• Needs some interface tweaks for usability. Some things are just not located where they should be. Example: I have to go several tabs in to select a deity, and then go back to the first tab to select Cleric? The Tabs should be progressive in how a user uses each.

In all fairness, there are good things for PC gen, like the random traits and total flexibility on the ability for a user to customize the data available. I also thought all the options for character sheet appearance was neat.

That being said I needed a character generator that hit these three marks:

1) My Players would be comfortable using
2) Could quickly generate characters and continue to track them
3) Flexibility for user generated content


My Players would never use PCGen. Even accounting for a learning curve, it’s too slow in it’s generation of characters and failed the (use with a laptop at a game test) The only one of my criteria it hit was the flexibility for user generated content.

In conclusion, we’re going to sit back and wait till and updated version of heroforge comes out. When real-world work items clear up a bit, I’ll see if I can pitch in to the whole heroforge project.

If you know of a Pathfinder compliant character generator, let me know!