What Thaumaturgy is
Thaumaturgy plays ambient sound and sound effects for tabletop role-playing games — D&D,
Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu and the rest. It is free and runs in the browser. It needs JavaScript,
which is switched off here, so what follows describes the app instead of running it.
Three screens
Session is where you play: the environment that is running, the boards you have loaded,
and the strip of saved scenes. Environments is where you build and organise environments.
Boards is where you build boards. On a phone a fourth tab, More, holds the master
volume, your account and the links out to the guides.
Environments
An environment is the sound of a place, built from up to twelve layers playing at once. Every
layer is one sound from the library plus the same seven dials. A loop — rain, a drone, a
crowd — plays the whole time. A set of random sounds — drips, footsteps, a distant
wolf — fires one short recording at a time on a cadence you set, each at a random pitch and
position, so the place never repeats the same way twice. The dials are Frequency (how often it
fires), Randomness (how much the timing wanders), Volume, Distance (farther is quieter, duller and
wider), Reverb, Echo and Echo delay. Changes play live.
103 environments ship with the app and all of them can be edited: Dripping Cave, Tavern,
Thunderstorm, Deep Swamp, Dwarven Halls, Ancient Tomb, Sea Cave, Market Square, Underdark,
Feywild Glade, Throne Room and Dragon’s Lair among them. Keep your version under its own
name, or export every environment you have saved to a file.
Boards
A board is a grid of large buttons, one sound each, for the things that happen: a door, a spell,
a sword. Tap one and it fires; a button set to loop keeps going until it is tapped again. 35
boards ship with the app — general ones, a set for creatures and one for each character
class — and you can build your own from any sound in the library. Each board has its own
volume and each button its own level, so a board can sit under the scene instead of on top of it. You can also loop an MP3,
OGG or WAV from your own computer; that file never leaves the browser.
Scenes, adventures and campaigns
A scene is an environment and the boards for it, saved together and loaded in one tap, crossfading
from whatever was playing. Scenes are grouped into adventures, and adventures into campaigns, so
the tavern, the mine and the road to it sit side by side while you run them. An optional account
— an emailed link, no password — syncs environments, boards, scenes and campaigns
between devices.
Keyboard
Esc stops every sound, or closes the dialog if one is open. Tab moves between controls. Enter or
Space fires the board button you are on, and opens or closes a collapsed section. In a layer’s
sound search the arrow keys move through the results and Enter picks one.
Guides and how-tos cover every screen and every dial in full.
