Warhammer: Mark of Chaos Designer Diary #3 - Finding Musical Inspiration in Lots of Skulls

Combat in real-time strategy games has always been about smashing armies, but Warhammer: Mark of Chaos will attempt to raise the bar to a brutal new level. Based on the iconic Warhammer miniatures game from Games Workshop, Mark of Chaos will bring the fantasy battlefields to life like never before. Hundreds of units, ranging from human infantry to huge demons that will devour that infantry, will fight it out in beautiful battle. Creating music for such games can be a difficult task. After all, you don't have examples from history to fall back on. In the latest update to our designer diaries, noted composer Jeremy Soule explains how he found inspiration in the gruesome grandeur of the Warhammer universe. Mark of Chaos ships later this year, but you can listen to two selections from the soundtrack (the main theme and imperial siege) now.

Warhammer Music

By Jeremy Soule
Composer

As I type this, I'm dreading the thought of subjecting readers through another dry and technical outlay of what makes music work in a game. Instead, I'd like to avoid the chat about buffer sizes and loop points and really just provide a picture of what the creative thought process is like for a composer working on Warhammer: Mark of Chaos.

Let's start by saying that Warhammer fans never cease to amaze me with their passion for this creative world. I always try to work very hard to understand the important elements that make a franchise tick. And, with Warhammer, some things just defy initial impressions.

To get the ball rolling, I took a visit to my local Games Workshop store. The store itself is tucked away in a very nondescript shopping mall in the North Shore district of Vancouver BC. The first thing I noticed about the interior of the store was the variety of customers. Shops to the left and right had no activity whatsoever, yet Games Workshop was quite busy. Not that this is unusual, but the same customers that were there when I went in didn't look to have the slightest notion of leaving after I had spent nearly 20 minutes in the store. They were busy discussing character attributes and gaming strategy and doing so with an interest that reminded me of the comic-book conventions I've attended over the years. The store itself had a very casual and relaxed atmosphere, and it appeared that the ages of the customers varied widely. I saw teens on upward to folks in their 50s and 60s looking through the models and books.

As far as the products themselves, they were amazingly detailed and definitely not toys for young kids. These small figures were collectible and serious items of art. Many of them appeared to be unpainted and ready for assembly. The sales person told me that customers would often paint their soldiers using a single hair of a paintbrush. He also said it could take months or years to paint enough units to make for a complete army. Considering that many people stop playing a video game after a few weeks, the amount of prep time involved in really getting involved with Warhammer seems like eons by comparison. It became clear to me that this is more than a tabletop game but a very serious pursuit and hobby that involves many forms of creative and artistic skills.

The game pieces included huge oversized weapons and an abundance of skulls that seemed to give nearly a black-comedy style to the armies. Yet, after a while, the exaggerations of the figures seemed to parlay the twisted appearance into more of a greater respect for the actions of weaponry each unit presented. In other words, the big weapons and skulls are simply pumped up to make the imaginary battles all the more brutal.

To a composer, this curious mix of the exaggerated and the violent begs for an epic war score. It's as if almost all the usual techniques of scoring a war game have to be contorted in a manner that traces the art direction of the game. While all of this antihedonistic art philosophy works wonders in visual terms, it's especially difficult to make music that follows suit and is interesting. So the question is now where does a composer go for inspiration and source material for this very bleak and focused world?

The closest thing we have to Warhammer in history is the Dark Ages. I've studied one of the greatest composers of all time from this era, and his name is Anonymous. Yes, Mr. (or Ms.) Anonymous was a genius. Amazingly prolific, Anonymous came before Bach in more ways than just the alphabet. I also suspect that this fine composer was worried about getting an ax to the skull because the compositions were generally very simple, monophonic, and sometimes very provocative. Long rehearsal times may have meant for more irritable neighbors and musicians, especially when the principle instrument was a war drum. I suspect signals were always getting crossed during a performance..."Hey, that's a war drum, they are attacking, let's kill 'em," and another voice would say, "Nah, that's just Mick Jagger playing that devil music again."

The next thing I'll mention is the detail of this game rivals anything I saw at Games Workshop. If you zoom close to these units, the detail doesn't fall apart. Considering that normally my camera is hovering at a scale of 150 to 200 feet above each army, it's amazing what a game like this is doing to make sure that each and every soldier has personality and grit. This sort of exacting construction of the artwork is very helpful for me when I'm creating melodies and harmony.

With all of the war and destruction that Mark of Chaos has to offer, I always want music to have some sort of attractive aesthetic. Even in the ugly moments of a score, there should be some sort of beauty. Warhammer and beauty aren't exactly bedfellows. It's a bit like imagining a 10-foot-tall, 500-pound conductor with skulls and spikes everywhere talking to the orchestra, "Flutes, I shall hack thy instruments to pieces. You aren't 'Warhammer.'" (Yes, these images sometimes oddly come into my head when I'm looking at a battle scene.)

Yes, I'm reaching for a lot of instruments I'm known for, which includes huge brass, heavy low strings, and a 100-foot-diameter drum. I'm also working to find creative uses of some of the more feminine instruments of the orchestra. I didn't want my woodwind section to fall victim to the conductor I mentioned above--not yet anyway. So, the smaller instruments are speaking in shrill and urgent terms to gain the tension required to compete with the heavy brass and lower strings. In the video that accompanies this article, you'll hear this technique in the opening few seconds of the music.

Overall, I find Mark of Chaos to be a really fascinating project, and I plan to learn more about this world over the coming weeks. At this stage of development, I still feel like I'm gaining my balance in terms of a writing style for the property. Even the music presented at the Electronic Entertainment Expo was a work in progress. There's simply more information revealed with each update to the game. I'm also a composer that is very inspired through visual means. I have always said that my hero, Jerry Goldsmith, was best at taking visual information and converting it into musical notes. Mark of Chaos has the sort of visual attention to detail that makes for great drama in music. I'll also make sure the orchestra gets that 500-pound conductor to keep them in line. I have nothing against flutes or clarinets, but wrong notes are another story.