After scoring the cold North of Svilland for Dream Realm Storytellers, they brought me somewhere very different: Tolia, the world of Bloodpunk — a dark, dystopic, Victorian-flavoured 5E setting where blood itself is the fuel of civilisation.
It’s one of the most distinctive worlds I’ve been asked to score. Since the discovery of a magical crystal called Angst, blood powers everything in Tolia — trains, zeppelins, radios, weapons, factories — and the people are literally drained to feed the war machines of the ruling class. The Bloodpunk Kickstarter raised over £209,000 from nearly 4,000 backers, and I wrote ten tracks for it.
Art: Dream Realm Storytellers
A Strings-First World
Bloodpunk is Victorian before it is anything else, so I built the score around strings — cello and violin doing most of the emotional and structural work. Where Svilland was raw and modal, Bloodpunk is chamber-tight and corseted: refined surfaces with something rotten underneath. The string writing gave me the period feel and, crucially, a flexible voice that could be elegant in one track and predatory in the next.
That duality is the whole setting in miniature. Tolia looks like industrial sophistication; it runs on human suffering. The music had to carry both at once.
Leitmotifs for the Factions
I started the way I start most worldbuilding scores: not with tracks, but with themes for the factions. Before writing a single finished cue, I wrote musical identities for the powers of Tolia. Once those existed, the soundtrack could be built from them — the same melodies recurring and transforming depending on how the action shifts.
This is the part of the craft I find most rewarding. A leitmotif system means the music isn’t a playlist of moods; it’s a language. When a faction’s theme surfaces inside another track, distorted or fragmented, the score is telling the table something the rulebook isn’t. The repetition is the point. It’s how a world starts to feel internally consistent through sound.
Two Cities, Two Sound Worlds
The sharpest challenge was that Tolia’s people live under one of two tyrannical cities — Kanrath or Cyherested — and the two had to sound like different kinds of oppression.
Cyherested I scored toward jazz. The city is sophistication and refinement with rebellion and edge underneath — a place of secrets, hidden agendas, and the quiet influence of the wealthy. Jazz harmony gave it that smoke-and-velvet feel: outwardly cultured, inwardly dangerous. It’s the city that smiles at you.
Kanrath got the opposite treatment. Ruled by vampires, it’s raw power and dread — a city always on the brink of war. The music there is darker and more ominous, stripped of Cyherested’s polish. Where one city seduces, the other threatens.
Writing two contrasting urban identities inside one cohesive score is a worldbuilding exercise as much as a musical one. They had to feel like they belonged to the same world — same Victorian bones, same blood-soaked logic — while being unmistakably distinct the moment you heard them. The shared string palette held them together; harmony and aesthetic pulled them apart.
What Bloodpunk Taught Me
Bloodpunk proved how much contrast a single, consistent palette can carry. I didn’t need a different orchestra for each city — I needed a different attitude from the same instruments. That’s an efficient, powerful tool for tabletop and game work, where you’re often building a large, varied world on a focused set of sounds.
It also reinforced something Svilland had started: the strongest worldbuilding scores commit fully to a world’s premise. Tolia runs on blood. Once I accepted that as the emotional centre — beauty built on cruelty — every musical decision had somewhere to come from.
You can read the original announcement in Bloodpunk: a Dark and Ominous Soundtrack.
For more on this approach, the musical worldbuilding hub collects other projects where music and world are built together.
If this kind of compositional thinking interests you — writing music shaped by a world’s internal logic, not just its surface aesthetic — it’s something I work on directly in private mentoring. It starts with a short call to see if we’re a fit.