Ambience for Your Table: Suno AI (with Caveats)

So, in the past I've picked up all sorts of music for tabletop RPG ambience. I treasure both of Stephen Michael Sechi's Music from Talislanta CDs, for example, and the first year they did GenCon I bought all of Toxic Bag Productions' available sound effects CDs. I love me some tabletop ambience, which is ironic as most of my face-to-face gaming lately has been in hobby shops, which are the worst places to do ambience; my FLGS doesn't have rooms, so we're out in the middle of the shop floor with all the noise of 40K players competing with my GM voice.

And there are plenty of people who do tabletop gaming music for free. There was a point where I had listened to everything Matti Paalanen put online for tabletop ambience; he put whole albums online for free for people to use at their tabletop games. And for Traveller, the band Lord Weird Slough Feg put out the album Traveller, which actually tells a story.

So, all that to say, I have no problem paying somebody for the hard work they did making music that fits in with my game.

But sometimes you just want a quick piece to set a mood, and you want something for a specific setting or locale in a game. What to do?

For those cases, you can try using Suno AI. It recently got updated to a new version, and it actually generates some pretty good results. I generated three songs for the Spinward Marches in Traveller, and I wanted "folk song" types that you could hear someone playing on a guitar in the starport lounge. In each case, it generated two variants, which means you can have two different singers in different starports playing the same song but in slightly different ways. I would definitely pay have paid for these songs if someone made them available for the regular rate of single-song download (as of this writing, about $1 USD per song), but my budget being what it is these days, I couldn't afford to have them made for me. Check these out:

Tales of the Spinward Main
Version 1
Version 2

[Verse]
Dusty roads and broken trails
Fading suns and empty sails
Starships drift through cosmic lanes
Riding on the Spinward Main

[Verse 2]
Whispers from the void we hear
Echoes of the long-gone years
Navigating starlit skies
Underneath those ancient ties

[Chorus]
Drifting far
No land’s end
Cosmos feels like an old friend
Maps of stars and endless plains
Wanderers on the Spinward Main

[Verse 3]
Old time tales and battered hulls
Metal birds and cosmic gulls
Trading tales from ancient lore
Tracing steps of those before

[Verse 4]
Interstellar winds we chase
In this timeless frontier race
Charting stars without a name
Boundless is the Spinward Main

[Chorus]
Drifting far
No land’s end
Cosmos feels like an old friend
Maps of stars and endless plains
Wanderers on the Spinward Main

Spinward Trails
Version 1
Version 2

[Verse]
On the Spinward Main
Where the starlight fades
In a freighter's hold
Where dreams are made
Galaxy's edge just a whisper away
Travelers' hearts led astray

[Verse 2]
Jumping from port to port
With tales untold
Riches and wonders turn men to gold
Among the spacelanes
A life of chime
Follow the beacons
Chart no time

[Chorus]
Spinward trails
Where the cosmos bend
Through the void
Where stories blend
Every journey
A world unseen
Lost on the Spinward
Chasing a dream

[Verse 3]
Radiant bridges
Past distant suns
Fortunes trekked by the brave ones
Empty sky holds a thousand signs
With every jump
Seeking new lines

[Verse 4]
Derelict vessels mark paths of old
Cold vast silence
Secrets unfold
Maps of the heart
Drawn in stars
Every leap leaves unseen scars

[Chorus]
Spinward trails
Where the cosmos bend
Through the void
Where stories blend
Every journey
A world unseen
Lost on the Spinward
Chasing a dream

Glisten Belt Voyage
Version 1
Version 2

[Verse]
An old starship
Rust on her bones
Through the vastness
Far from home
Engines hum
A lonely tune
Underneath a silver moon

[Verse 2]
Glisten Belt in eyes ahead
Whispers of the stars they shed
Lost in void
No roadmap plan
Trust in fate
The journey’s span

[Chorus]
Out past the comet trails
To where the light is frail
In the dark
We make amends
Chasing dreams that never end

[Verse 3]
Hollow halls
Echoes call
Sail past asteroids standing tall
Alien sun
A ghostly glow
Guides us where we need to go

[Verse 4]
Stardust lands on weary skin
Memories of places we've been
Leaping through the space night air
Finding hope in voids out there

[Chorus]
Out past the comet trails
To where the light is frail
In the dark
We make amends
Chasing dreams that never end

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