I was invited by Michael Ghelfi Studios to write music for Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords — one of the most celebrated Adventure Paths in tabletop RPG history. It was an opportunity I approached with both excitement and a significant amount of preparation, because this kind of project demands something specific: not just music that sounds like fantasy, but music that sounds like this world, these characters, this story.
What follows is a detailed account of how I approached it.
Step 1: Immersing in the Adventure Path
Before writing a single note, I read through the entire Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path — every plot twist, every character backstory, every detailed world description. This wasn’t a skim for inspiration. It was a systematic attempt to understand the story’s emotional architecture from the inside.
As I read, I took extensive notes. Not just on the obvious story beats — the battles, the reveals, the climaxes — but on the subtler things. The emotional currents beneath the action. Moments of foreshadowing that a first-time player won’t notice. The way different characters embody specific virtues or sins, not as abstract concepts, but through their choices, their relationships, their deaths.
Music has to tell the story as much as the words on the page. That only works if the composer has genuinely absorbed the story’s logic — not just its surface events but its internal architecture. By the end of that reading process, I wasn’t just familiar with Runelords. I was attuned to its rhythm, its emotional highs and lows, and the specific ways each part of the adventure could be given a deeper musical life.
This kind of immersion is, I think, the prerequisite for the rest. If you shortcut it, the music you write will be competent but generic. It will sound like fantasy, not like this fantasy.
Step 2: Building 14 Themes for Virtues and Sins
The structural heart of Rise of the Runelords is the interplay between virtues and sins — the seven deadly sins and their virtuous counterparts thread through the entire Adventure Path, from the identity of the Runelords themselves to the choices players make along the way.
Once I understood how central that opposition was, the compositional approach became clear: I needed distinct musical identities for each virtue and each sin. Not just a “good theme” and an “evil theme,” but specific, differentiated musical voices for charity, for love, for greed, for wrath — 14 themes in total.
This is harder than it sounds. A theme for greed has to be recognisably different from a theme for wrath, even though both function as antagonistic forces. The difference has to come from musical character, not just orchestration or register. Greed is calculating — its theme should feel acquisitive, patient, slightly cold. Wrath is immediate — its theme should feel urgent, impulsive, combustible.
The same care applies to the virtues. Charity and love might seem adjacent, but they’re not interchangeable emotionally. One is outward-facing and generous; the other is particular and vulnerable. Both need their own musical voice.
Working out 14 distinct themes — and making sure they all inhabit the same world, the same tonal space, while still being clearly distinguishable — was one of the most demanding compositional exercises this project gave me. The process was slow and iterative, but it produced something I value: a score where you can hear which principle is at stake in any given scene, if you know what to listen for.
Coherence Across the Path
The other function of the theme system was structural coherence. Rise of the Runelords spans six books — a long, complex narrative arc. The themes needed to work as narrative anchors across that whole arc, giving Gamemasters and players a musical thread to follow as the story develops.
When a sin theme returns in a later book, in a different context, with a different treatment, it carries the weight of every time you’ve heard it before. That’s what leitmotifs do in film scoring; it works just as well in tabletop music. The themes don’t just identify what’s happening in a scene — they bring a history with them.
Step 3: Scoring for Tabletop, Not Film
One thing that shapes every decision in tabletop RPG music is that you’re not composing to picture. There’s no fixed edit. The Gamemaster decides how long a scene lasts, which track to use when, whether to let a piece play out or cut it short.
This creates constraints that film scoring doesn’t have. Every piece has to be able to loop gracefully — it can’t depend on a climax at the 3-minute mark. Every piece has to be legible at low volume, because there will be conversation over it. And every piece has to be appropriate for a range of scene durations without feeling like it’s running out of ideas.
These aren’t limitations I resented. They shaped the music productively. The constraint of looping, for example, pushed me to think carefully about the internal shape of each piece — not as a through-composed arc, but as a world you can inhabit. Pieces that loop well have a kind of completeness to them, an internal logic that doesn’t depend on going somewhere. That quality makes them feel less like background music and more like a place.
Music as Narrative, Not Backdrop
In a lot of game music — and a lot of film music, honestly — the score functions as atmosphere. It creates mood and texture, but it doesn’t carry narrative weight. It tells you the scene is tense without telling you why it’s tense. It sounds epic without meaning anything specific.
My approach to Runelords was to resist that. I wanted each piece to feel like an active storytelling device — something that carries a specific narrative truth, not just a general emotional temperature. That’s what the virtue and sin themes make possible. When the music of wrath appears beneath a dialogue scene, it’s not just saying “this feels dangerous.” It’s saying “there is wrath at work here.” Those aren’t the same statement.
That level of narrative specificity is harder to achieve and not always audible on a first listen. But for Gamemasters who know the score and the story, it adds a layer of depth that I think is worth the effort.
What This Project Taught Me
Rise of the Runelords crystallised something I’d been developing across other projects: the most valuable thing a composer can bring to a complex world is a systematic way of reading it.
Not just “what does this scene need?” but “what is the architecture of this whole narrative, and how can music make that architecture audible?” The 14-theme system wasn’t an aesthetic choice — it was a response to the narrative logic of the Adventure Path. The system came from the story, not from me imposing a compositional idea onto it.
That responsiveness — reading what a world actually needs rather than applying a pre-formed approach — is what I think of as the core of musical worldbuilding. Runelords was one of the clearest examples of that principle in my work.
You can find the music through the Michael Ghelfi Studios platform.
For more on this approach, visit the musical worldbuilding hub.
If this kind of narrative-driven compositional thinking interests you — building thematic systems from a world’s internal logic, writing music that carries story rather than just atmosphere — this is exactly what I work on in private mentoring sessions. It starts with a short call to see if we’re a fit.