Campfire ambience for D&D
Three loops, embers every six seconds, and a wolf twice an hour. The recipe for the scene players actually talk through.
A campfire is three loops stacked — fire at 60%, crickets at 40%, a breeze at 25% — with ember pops every six seconds close by and almost nothing else. This is the scene the party talks through, so it has to survive an hour: no reverb to speak of, and the only distant events are an owl and a wolf you will hear maybe twice.
What it sounds like
The campfire scene is where a party does its actual business — levelling up, arguing, deciding what to do about the thing in the woods — and it always runs longer than you planned. That makes it the one ambience that has to be genuinely unobtrusive.
Three loops is how it gets there. Fire, crickets and a light breeze each have texture and no events, so none of them demands attention and the combination never quite repeats. The only fast layer is ember pops, close by every six seconds, and embers are about the most ignorable sound there is.
Then the discipline: two distant layers and that is all. An owl a minute, and wolves about every two and a half, very far. The urge is to add more — something moving, another animal — and the result is an ambience that keeps interrupting the conversation it exists to support.
The recipe, dial by dial
This is the environment as it ships. Every layer is the same kind of thing — one sound from the library and a set of dials — so there is nothing special about which slot a sound sits in. The names are only names.
| Layer | Sound | How often | Wander | Volume | Distance | Reverb | Echo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fire | Campfire | loop | — | 60% | close | off | off |
| Crickets | Night crickets | loop | — | 40% | close | off | off |
| Owl | Owl | every ~60 s | 70% | 50% | far | medium | 1 bounce |
| Wolves far off | Wolf howl | rare, every ~150 s | 70% | 50% | very far | medium | 1 bounce |
| Wind | Light breeze | loop | — | 25% | close | off | off |
| Embers | Ember pops | every ~6.0 s | 70% | 50% | close | medium | 1 bounce |
Master volume 80%. Every number above is read out of the environment that ships in the app, and printed in the words the app prints beside each slider.
- Fire — 60%. Comfortable rather than loud, because it is going to run for an hour.
Campfire - Crickets — A second loop at 40%. The reason it is outdoors rather than a hearth.
Night crickets - Owl — A minute, far. One identifiable animal is enough to place the camp.
Owl - Wolves far off — About every two and a half minutes, very far. You will hear it twice in a long scene, which is exactly right.
Wolf howl - Wind — A third loop at 25%. Barely audible on its own, and what stops the other two from locking into a pattern.
Light breeze - Embers — Every six seconds, close. The only fast layer, and a deliberately unremarkable one.
Ember pops
What each dial does is covered once, properly, in Environments & layers.
Boards to load with it
The environment is the place; boards are the things that happen in it. These three ship built in and suit this one:
Load them, then press + New scene and the environment and the boards come back together next week in one tap. Scenes covers that.
Make it yours
The late watch
Camp, Late Watch ships built in: fire down, night up, and the distant layers doing more work. The right environment for a one-on-one scene while everyone else is asleep.
Camp in the rain
Add a rain layer at about 35% and leave the fire where it is. A fire still going in the rain is a specific kind of comfort.
The fire going out
Over the scene, bring the fire down by hand to a quarter and raise the crickets. Nobody will mention it, and the scene will get quieter on its own.
None of this is destructive: the built-in environments cannot be overwritten. Change what you like, and press Save a copy as… when it sounds right.
The recordings
Every sound this environment uses, and who recorded it. Most of the library is public domain; the Creative Commons Attribution recordings are credited here because that is what the licence asks for. The full list is on Sounds & licensing.
- Campfire — campfire.wav by aerror (CC0)
- Night crickets — Night Crickets Back Porch.aiff by hdfreema (CC0)
- Owl — Owl Hoot by Breviceps (CC0)
- Owl — owl.wav by Anthousai (CC0)
- Owl — owl_hooting_000102_0145S3 002-070 000-002 068-074.wav by Gerent (CC0)
- Owl — Owl Hooting.mp3 by howebzar (CC0)
- Wolf howl — Wolf howl by NaturesTemper (CC0)
- Wolf howl — Scary Ghost Wolf Howling.wav by BrainClaim (CC0)
- Wolf howl — Howling wolves by Kingcornz (CC0)
- Wolf howl — 15-WolfCrying.wav by cazadordoblekatana (CC0)
- Light breeze — Looping Gentle Wind Ambience on an Open Desert Plain.wav by dhallcomposer (CC0)
- Ember pops — Fire Crackling by AntumDeluge (CC0)
- Ember pops — Fire Ignite.wav by Jo000 (CC0)
- Ember pops — Fire_Crackle_1.wav by KieranKeegan (CC0)
- Ember pops — Fire Crackling - Cozy Campfire & Fireplace SFX by LilMati (CC0)
- Ember pops — Crackle #1.wav by abstraktgeneriert (CC0)
Related
Open Campfire in Thaumaturgy — it is free, there is nothing to install, and nothing to sign up for.
Updated 24 October 2026