In this interview, Hexany Audio composer Robert Wolf touches on crafting musical flexibility and composing narrative in Critical Role's score "Welcome to Tal'Dorei."

With its invigorating battle scores and enchanting atmospheric sounds, Critical Role understands the importance of a killer score. Throughout each campaign, music is as active a player as anyone else at the table. It drives the adventure forward with powerful orchestrations and enhances magic with sparkling symphonies; all this, to envelop the players in the world around them. Now, Critical Role invites fellow D&D players to take their own adventure through Tal'Dorei with their score, "Welcome to Tal'Dorei."

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The score is Critical Role's first major venture into music, following the establishment of their record label Scanlan Shorthalt Music. The company collaborated with composers Colm McGuinness, Omar Fadel, and a team at Hexany Audio to create a lively 17-track album. Meant to immerse listeners, the album takes inspiration from Tal'Dorei and Exandria to craft an audio adventure fit for any D&D campaign.

We had a chance to speak with Robert Wolf, Hexany Audio composer, about his experience creating the Critical Role score. In our interview, he discusses balancing different moods with potential campaign scenes, remaining musically flexible, and crafting audio textures.

Critical Role Album Robert Wolf interview

How did you join the project, and what about it excited you the most? Were you a fan of Critical Role coming into it?

Robert Wolf: When our lead composer, Matthew Carl Earl, first told me that I would get to write several tracks for Critical Role, I was beyond excited! I grew up playing many different table-top RPGs with my friends in Germany and have been an avid Dungeons & Dragons player since I moved to the US. Writing music for a show that is so beloved by the Dungeons & Dragons community and beyond was an absolute dream!

It’s no secret that the show has hours upon hours of epic tales and action scenes. How did you tackle such an expansive narrative to create music that keeps the world feeling so fresh and vibrant?

Wolf: One of the great aspects of this project was that we got to write music for many different moods that typically come up in a DnD campaign. So, we wrote music based on general themes like “peaceful” or “creepy” and many more. When I was writing my tracks, I tried to imagine a scene to go with these moods to make the music feel grounded in one imagined location. So, in addition to the musical mood, I would also think of exploring a dark cave or traveling through a serene countryside towards a city or village. This really helped me to write music that feels very specific to DnD settings but is still flexible enough to be used in different parts of a campaign. 

Critical Role Album Robert Wolf interview

As a show set within the widely popular genre of fantasy, what do you think are the unique defining elements and themes of the sound of Tal’Dorei?

Wolf: So, the album is called “Welcome to Tal’Dorei”, but it really is intended to work with other Tabletop RPG settings. The album covers the whole range of settings and moods adventurers will encounter on their campaigns, from hopeful pieces over scary, magical, sad or whimsical tracks to heroic and triumphant sections. I am really excited for fans to discover the range this album has to offer and hope they will take inspiration for their own games.

One of the greatest joys and strengths of Dungeons & Dragons is that it brings adventures to life through the magic of collaborative storytelling. Every narrative element, character, and ability are, by nature, born through collaboration. What are some ways you’ve collaborated with the production team and cast members to help build out the world of the game through music?

Wolf: The production team was great at communicating what emotions and effects the music was supposed to create but gave us a lot of flexibility and creative freedom to produce these tracks. Part of the collaboration was them giving us feedback on our work, some tracks might need more or less dramatic moments in order to facilitate the kind of dynamic storytelling Critical Role is known for. So, this feedback loop ultimately made the collaboration very successful.

As a live, improv-based series, the players of Critical Role can often lead the story into unexpected territory – sidebars, comedic scenes, or just twists and turns that are difficult to anticipate. How do you approach composing for such scenes, knowing they’ve yet to be created?

Wolf: I hope that our music comes in handy in exactly those moments. Since we wrote our music based on general moods and themes, they can be applied to many different situations. This approach seemed to make the most sense, since, as you said, the exact course of the story cannot always be anticipated with certainty. These unexpected turns, these funny scenes on the side, are what makes Critical Role so great, and they enrich any TTRPG campaign. Being allowed to write music for something that is so unique to Dungeons and Dragons was really special for me.

What’s something you’re excited for listeners to discover with the official album Welcome to Tal’Dorei?

Wolf: This album features so many beautiful tracks, it’s hard to choose. We have a great team of composers at Hexany Audio and many of them were able to contribute their unique styles to the album. Personally, I had the pleasure of contributing three tracks. “Entering Zephrah” is a lush and peaceful track that depicts the sense of safety and calm a player experience when entering a small, beautiful village (such as Zephrah) after a long and dangerous adventure. For “The Caverns of Crystalfen”, I recorded myself to accomplish wind-like breath effects and combined that with creepy cluster effects, low brass, eerie harp sections and some interesting string textures. Fans might recognize some sinister laughs in the second half of the track. Yes, these laughs are from Matthew Mercer himself. I was super excited when I received these audio samples and was asked to build them into my track. For “Umbra Hills” I created a ghostly choir and distant wailing effects with my own voice and combined that with, at times, quite dramatic orchestral textures. But my favorite track on the album is “Illusory Bonds” by my talented colleague Sterling Maffe. It features such lush textures and emotional phrases while also bringing in sinister undertones—it’s just a joy to listen to!

I really hope fans will listen to our music and make it their own and that it will help them imagine their own adventures and become more immersed in their existing campaigns.

For those wanting to listen to Robert Wolf's tracks on the Critical Role score, Welcome to Tal’Dorei is available for purchase and streaming on all major digital music platforms.