Ambient sound for Pathfinder and other RPGs
Nothing in the library is tied to a rules system. Which environments carry over to horror, modern and sci-fi tables, and where your own audio fills the gap.
Nothing in Thaumaturgy is tied to a rules system: a dripping cave sounds the same in Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu or Shadowdark, so choose the environment that matches the place rather than the game. Horror tables lean on the dungeon and haunted environments, modern and science-fiction tables on weather, crowds and city streets, with your own audio for whatever a fantasy library has no equivalent of.
Choose the place, not the game
A dripping cave sounds the same in every system there has ever been, which is why none of the environments is named after a rules set. Ask what the room is — underground, wet, crowded, outdoors at night — and pick from that. Everything else in this guide is a special case of it.
Start from the family that matches the room
The environments are grouped by the kind of place rather than the kind of game — sixteen families: Dungeon, Water, Sea, Mountains, Ice, Desert, Lava, Hell, Heaven, Forest, Camp, Country, Town, Castle, Underdark and Weather. A Call of Cthulhu investigator standing in a flooded basement wants Flooded Dungeon; the trenches outside a Warhammer town want Siege Camp. The name of an environment is a description of a place, not a claim about a genre.
Swap the furniture, not the recipe
Where the place has no fantasy equivalent, build it out of the parts that do. A modern street at night is City Street, Night — which ships with a rain layer switched off, so one checkbox puts the weather on it. A ship's engine deck is Dwarven Halls: a machine-room loop with anvils, bellows and carts at three distances, and switching its footsteps off stops it reading as a forge. The recipe — one bed, one or two things happening, a second distance — does not change with the genre.
Bring your own audio for the rest
No fantasy library has an engine room or a police scanner in it. Your own sounds, at the bottom of the Play screen, takes any MP3, OGG, WAV or FLAC from your device — up to 250 MB — and a short one can go on a board or into an environment layer while a long one plays as a background track. Signed in, they reach your other devices; while a broadcast is live, your players hear them exactly as they hear everything else.
Keep the system's own beats on boards
Every game has moments that are mechanical rather than physical: initiative, a failed save, a sanity check, a stress marker, a clock filling. Those are board buttons — named for the mechanic, in the words your table uses — and they are the one genuinely system-specific thing worth building. See building a soundboard.
Which systems do people run it with?
The home page names fifteen: Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, Daggerheart, Shadowdark, Blades in the Dark, Savage Worlds, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Vampire: The Masquerade, Mörk Borg, Old-School Essentials, Dungeon World, Cyberpunk RED, Fate and GURPS. That list is who has written in or said so, not a compatibility matrix — there is nothing to be compatible with. Thaumaturgy never sees your rules, your characters or your dice; it plays the sound of a place while you run whatever you are running.
Is anything in it actually D&D-specific?
Two things, and both are names rather than behavior. The class boards are named for D&D’s classes, and the creature boards for its monsters — a board called Owlbear is a board of a large angry animal, and it does not stop being useful because your game calls it something else. The button names are yours: rename them, or duplicate the board and rename the copy. The environments carry no system vocabulary at all.
The one place to be careful is a spell button. The Magic board and the class boards lean on elemental and arcane effects — fire, lightning, frost, healing, curses, teleports — which travel to most fantasy systems unchanged and travel badly to a game whose magic is quieter than that. Build a board of four restrained sounds instead; it will beat a borrowed one.
Horror tables
What makes horror ambience work is timing rather than content, and the clearest example of it in the library is Haunted Corridor: ordinary sounds — creaking wood, a door, distant crying — with the wander dial set higher than anywhere else in the app, so the table cannot work out when the next one is coming. Crypt, Ossuary, Madhouse and Shadowfell are the other obvious starting points, and Haunted Manor for anything with a house in it. Then cut the sound dead at the moment it matters: silence is the loudest thing in the app, and it costs nothing.
Modern and science-fiction tables
Said plainly: the library is fantasy-first and there is no sci-fi family. What carries over is more than it sounds, though, because a great deal of any modern scene is weather, machinery and people:
| What you need | What to start from |
|---|---|
| A street at night | City Street, Night and Rooftops, Night — both ship with a rain layer switched off |
| Weather over everything | Rain, Thunderstorm, Snowfall |
| A crowd, a bar, a market | Tavern; Market Square; Festival |
| Under the city | Sewers; Abandoned Mine |
| Machinery under load | Dwarven Halls — a machine-room loop with anvils, bellows and carts at three distances |
| A corridor with something in it | Flooded Dungeon with its two water loops switched off: a cramped tunnel, and something large moving further in |
| Dread with no source at all | Tension — a heartbeat and a hush, and nothing else — or Dream |
| Engines, comms, a particular vehicle | Your own audio. The library has none of it |
If the answer for your table is mostly that last row, say so through the feedback form in the app. The library grows by request, and the requests are how the list of places gets chosen.
Does it cost anything, or need an account?
No, and no. Every environment, every board and every sound is free and there is nothing to install — open it in a browser and press play. An account is free too and buys three things: your work on every device, campaigns, and broadcasting to your players.
Next
Ready? Open Thaumaturgy — it is free, and there is nothing to install.
Updated 1 November 2026