Video tour — transcript

Cold open

Hey. This is Thaumaturgy — a sound app for running tabletop games, on a laptop or a phone, from behind the screen. Here's how it works.

The two sections

A session is split into two sections. Up top is the environment: the sounds that play in the background the whole time — water dripping in a cave, wind, the hum of a tavern. You set it up once, press play, and it just runs. These chips are the layers it's built from, and we'll get into those.

Underneath are the boards: big buttons for one-off moments and special events — a sword swing, a door slamming, somebody screaming. You tap those as they happen, right on top of the environment.

Environment for the place. Boards for the action. That's the whole idea.

Basic navigation

Three screens, up here. Session is where you run the game. Environments is where you build the sound of a place. Boards is where you build your buttons. Master volume, and a big red stop — for when somebody says "what is that noise."

Play, and the cave's back. It never loops the same way twice — the drips land at random, so it never turns into a pattern. Armor hit, twice — and that's not the same clip. Most buttons carry a few takes and pick one each time.

Stop all, and everything's quiet.

Choosing an environment

Environments live in this dropdown. A handful are built in, and you'll make your own.

Torture Dungeon. Yeah. That one's for a specific kind of evening.

Press "Edit environments", and you can see what an environment actually is. It's a list of layers.

The layers, and what every dial does

Four layers here — Rhythm, Ambient, Accent, Extras — but the names are just names. Every layer is the same thing: one sound from the library, and a set of dials.

Each layer has two pickers. The first is where the sound comes from — cave, castle, prison. The second is the sound itself, in two groups. Loops play the whole time — wind, a drone, a crowd. Random sounds drop in now and then — drips, footsteps, a scream. And you can mix. Castle footsteps in a cave? Sure.

Now the dials. Frequency is how often it fires — drag it left and the drips get rare, drag it right and it's raining in here. Randomness is how much the timing wanders. All the way down, a metronome. All the way up, anything goes.

Volume's volume. Distance pushes the sound away — farther out it's quieter, duller, wider, like it's down the hall instead of at your feet. Reverb is the size of the room. Echo is how many repeats come back, and echo delay is the gap between them.

And everything changes live. You just move the thing and listen.

Ambient is a loop, so frequency and randomness just go away — nothing to schedule. But distance still works: push the whole room farther off. Turn on Accent and give it chains. And Extras… prisoners, far off. There we go. That's a dungeon.

And if the scene needs more — a scream now and then, rain over all of it — add a layer. Pick any sound; the dials follow. Stack as many as the scene needs.

Save the environment

When it sounds right, save a copy. Give it a name — this one's the Goblin Warrens — and it lands under "My environments". From here on it's yours: rename it, reorder the list, and every tweak saves itself. Back on Session it's in the dropdown. Come back next week, pick it, press play.

Save it to a chapter

Now, up here — chapters. A chapter is a whole scene: the environment, plus every board loaded for it, saved as one thing. Press "New chapter," give it a name, and whatever's on screen right now is remembered.

See the little play mark? Every chapter has an auto-play tick in its menu. Leave it on, and loading the chapter starts the environment for you. We'll come back to this with some boards.

Building boards — the first one

Over to Boards. New board — call it Goblin Fight.

The library's on the right. Filter it by family, or just type what you're after. Every sound has a play button, so listen before you commit. That one. Add. Arrow strike, add. Blade slash. And Loud Angry Mob — that one I want looping, so I tick loop, and it runs until I tap it again.

Every button gets a name, and a little note underneath. The note's for you — "swing and a miss" — so mid-fight you're not reading a filename.

Takes — hearing each one and dropping the ones you don't want

Some sounds come with several takes. Open them up — three here — and listen to each one. If one isn't right for you, untick it. Now that button only picks from the two you kept. And that's per button.

Two more boards, fast

Two more, quickly. Traps and Doors — iron door, cell door, a plank drop I'll call "trapdoor", and a whip crack that's going to be my snare. The name on the button is yours; the sound doesn't care.

For the third one I'll cheat: the built-in Alarms and Signals board is close to what I want, so — duplicate it, rename it, pull out the two I don't need. You can edit the built-in boards directly too. Your version is saved to you, and there's always a reset back to the original.

Load the boards, then save the chapter

Back on Session, load them in. Goblin Fight. Traps and Doors. Signals. And I'll drop the stock Combat board. Boards sit two across, one wide on a phone.

Now look at the chapter. It noticed things changed, and it's offering to save. Press that, and chapter one holds the Warrens environment and these three boards.

A second chapter — a whole different place

Chapter two is a tavern. Start from the quiet cavern and open it up. Rhythm becomes coins on the bar. The ambient loop becomes voices down the hall. Save that one as the Rusty Flagon. Back on Session, drop the goblin boards and swap in Magic, and Doors and Traps. New chapter, same name. Done.

Make as many as your night needs. One per scene — a whole campaign's worth, if you like.

Running the game with chapters

So, game night. Tap chapter one — the Warrens come up, the boards come with it, and the environment starts on its own. The mob wakes up. A hit. A miss.

When the scene goes somewhere you didn't plan, you don't have to leave the chapter. Swap a board on the fly: drop Traps, pull in Magic. The environment never stops.

Then the party walks into the tavern. Chapter two. Whole new place, whole new set of boards, one tap — and the old sound fades out as the new one fades in.

That's it. That's the whole app.

Close — the account

One last thing. Everything you just built lives in this browser. If you want it on your phone at the table and your laptop at home — or you just don't want to lose it — set up an account. It's your email and a link, no password to remember. Sign in, and your environments, boards and chapters follow you.

That's Thaumaturgy. Go run something.