The Best Music for Your D&D Sessions
The right music turns a good D&D session into a great one. Our picks for every scene, from tavern to boss fight, plus the free tools that make it easy.
Picture the moment: the party finally kicks open the door to the dragon’s lair, the DM says “roll initiative”, and a wall of drums and choir comes crashing in from the speaker in the corner. Everyone sits up. Someone says “oh no”. That’s what good music does for a D&D session.
The opposite is just as real. A pop song with lyrics during a sad scene, a sudden ad blaring in the middle of a puzzle, a track so loud nobody can hear the DM. Music can make or break the mood, so it’s worth getting right. Here’s how to pick music for your D&D sessions, the tools that make it easy, and our favourite soundtracks for every kind of scene.
Rook learned the “avoid ads” rule the hard way: a free streaming account, a tense final fight with a lich, and just as the cleric rolled to save the party, a cheerful advert for supermarket yoghurt. The table laughed for five minutes straight. The lich, sadly, still won.
The golden rules of D&D background music
Before the playlists, a few rules every DM learns the hard way.
- No lyrics (mostly). Words compete with the DM and the players. The exception is a bard’s tavern song or a moment where the lyrics are the point.
- Keep it quiet. Background music should be felt more than heard. If people raise their voices, turn it down.
- Make playlists by scene, not by game. You want to switch from “tavern” to “combat” in one tap, not scroll through a soundtrack looking for the right track.
- Avoid ads. Nothing kills the mood like a commercial in the middle of a boss fight. Use a premium account or download your music beforehand.
- Let it loop. Long, steady tracks work better than short ones that keep changing the mood.
The best tools for D&D music
Tabletop Audio
Free, made for exactly this, and our first recommendation for any new DM. Tabletop Audio is a website full of ten-minute ambient soundscapes for taverns, haunted castles, pirate coves and pretty much any place your party could end up. There’s no setup, you just press play. It also has a “SoundPad” mode for mixing layers yourself, like adding rain and a crackling fire to a tavern scene.
Where to get it: Tabletop Audio
Syrinscape
The power tool. Syrinscape is an app that builds soundscapes from layers (music, ambience and one-off sound effects like a roaring dragon) that you trigger with a click. It has official soundsets for lots of published D&D adventures, so you can match sounds to the exact room your players are in. It’s a paid subscription, so try the free content first and see if you’ll use it enough.
Where to get it: Syrinscape
Spotify and YouTube
For most groups, a few good playlists are all you need. Search for “D&D tavern music” or “fantasy battle music” and you’ll find thousands, or better, make your own from the soundtracks below. On YouTube, channels like Michael Ghelfi Studios make long ambient videos for specific places (a busy market, a cave, a ship in a storm) that are perfect for background sound.
Kenku FM (for online games)
Playing on Discord? Many of the old music bots shut down a few years ago, which left a lot of online groups in silence. Kenku FM is a free app that streams audio from your computer straight into a Discord voice channel, so everyone hears the same music in sync.
Where to get it: Kenku FM
The best soundtracks for every D&D scene
Here are the soundtracks we’d pull from for each kind of scene. Most of them are video game scores, because game composers are experts at music that loops for hours without getting annoying. (For more on these, see The Best Video Game Soundtracks of All Time.)
Tavern and town
You want something warm and lively, with lutes and fiddles, that makes people want to order another drink.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Marcin Przybyłowicz and Mikolai Stroinski): the tavern and city music, especially the Novigrad and Skellige tracks, is perfect.
- Baldur’s Gate 3 (Borislav Slavov): the camp and city music is cosy and very D&D, unsurprisingly.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: the instrumental tavern tracks work great. Skip the sung ones unless your bard is “performing”.
Travel and exploration
Long journeys need music that feels open and calm and doesn’t demand attention.
- The Lord of the Rings films (Howard Shore): the Shire and Rohan themes are classics for a reason.
- Skyrim: the exploration tracks (“Far Horizons”, “Secunda”) are made for wandering across mountains.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Manaka Kataoka and Yasuaki Iwata): gentle, sparse piano that sounds like wind over grass.
Dungeons and creepy places
For caves, crypts and abandoned temples you want low drones, odd noises and a feeling that something is watching.
- Darkest Dungeon (Stuart Chatwood): moody, gothic and dripping with dread.
- Hollow Knight (Christopher Larkin): beautiful and melancholic, ideal for ancient ruins.
- Dark Souls (Motoi Sakuraba): the quiet area music, between the boss fights, is pure underground loneliness.
Combat
Fast, rhythmic and exciting, but not so busy that it drowns out the dice.
- Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (both Borislav Slavov): turn-based combat music, which fits D&D’s pacing perfectly.
- Final Fantasy XIV (Masayoshi Soken): a huge library of battle themes, from heroic to unhinged.
- The Witcher 3: the battle tracks have a folk edge that suits low-magic games.
Boss fights
This is where you go big. Choirs, drums, the works. Save these for the moments that matter, so they keep their punch.
- Dark Souls III and Elden Ring (Yuka Kitamura, Motoi Sakuraba and team): huge orchestral and choral boss themes. Nothing tells players “this is the big one” quite like them.
- Skyrim: “One They Fear” or the dragon battle music for anything with wings and scales.
Emotional moments
A character’s death, a farewell, a quiet night by the campfire.
- Journey (Austin Wintory): music that says everything without words.
- Ori and the Blind Forest (Gareth Coker): tender, sad and full of hope at the same time.
- The Last of Us (Gustavo Santaolalla): sparse guitar that hits right in the chest.
Horror and dark campaigns
Running Curse of Strahd or something similar?
- Bloodborne (several composers): gothic horror at its finest.
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Mikko Tarmia): ambient terror that sits quietly in the background.
A simple D&D playlist setup
If you’re just starting out, make five playlists and you’re covered for almost any session:
| Playlist | Use it for | Good starting points |
|---|---|---|
| Town | Taverns, markets, safe places | The Witcher 3, Baldur’s Gate 3 |
| Travel | Journeys, exploring, downtime | Lord of the Rings, Skyrim |
| Dungeon | Caves, ruins, anything spooky | Darkest Dungeon, Hollow Knight |
| Combat | Regular fights | Baldur’s Gate 3, Final Fantasy XIV |
| Boss | Big, dramatic fights | Dark Souls III, Elden Ring |
Add a sixth for emotional scenes if your campaign has a lot of drama (it will).
A few tips from the DM’s chair
- Use silence. Dropping the music completely before a big reveal is often more dramatic than any track.
- Give villains a theme. Play the same track every time the big bad shows up, and your players will start to tense up the second they hear it.
- Let players pick their hero theme. Some groups give each character a short track for their big moments. It’s cheesy and everyone loves it.
- Prepare before the session. Spend ten minutes lining up the tracks you’ll need, so you’re not hunting for them while five people wait.
A quick note on streaming
Playing music for your friends at home is fine. Streaming your game publicly on Twitch or YouTube is different: copyrighted soundtracks can get your video muted or taken down. If you stream, check the licence terms of whatever you use or stick to royalty-free music.
Ready to set the mood
You don’t need fancy gear. A cheap Bluetooth speaker, a few playlists and the habit of turning the volume down will put you ahead of most tables. New to D&D altogether? Start with our How to Play D&D: A Complete Beginner’s Guide, and if you’re running your first game, a step-by-step guide for new Dungeon Masters is on the way.
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