Hydra Lets Us Play RPG Music Over Discord

The immersive power of music

I’ve written before about some of the uses of music for D&D and other RPGs. It comes down to the elusive concept of immersion. Playing music during our D&D session can help players forget the real world around them and dive deeper into the game. For online play via the software Discord there is a simple method of how to stream music to your players: Hydra.

The Hydra bot is a simple tool to let us play music for online games without much more hassle than doing it in person. We simply paste links to music we want our players to hear, and Hydra will stream our RPG soundtrack to everyone in the channel.

Setting up Hydra

To use Hydra in your Discord server, we add the bot to your channel. The website hydra.bot guides us through this process after we click on the button labelled “Invite.” Once we’ve added Hydra to our channel, the software is ready to go. I would, however, suggest setting up a designated song request channel to make controlling our RPG soundtrack even easier. Simply type “.setup” in the Discord chat, and the bot will create a new channel which functions as a media player.

Playing music through Hydra

Once we have Hydra set up, we’re ready to use it during your game. I like to have a handful of Spotify playlists ready to play for different moods during a session. When I want to stream a certain playlist, I copy the link for sharing the playlist and drop it into Hydra’s song request channel on Discord.

If another playlist is already playing, we can click the stop button to clear Hydra’s music queue before we paste the link for the new playlist.

The beauty of a Discord bot like Hydra is that players and we ourselves can individually control the volume of the music by adjusting the volume of the “user” Hydra in the voice channel. That way, everyone can listen to the music at their own comfortable level, or even mute Hydra if they prefer a game without music.

Requesting songs through Hydra requires no special privileges, so anyone can “DJ” during the session. To keep things simple, designating one person to control the music for our session is probably best. Most of the time this will be the DM setting an appropriate mood by playing fitting music. But if a player is up for it, delegating tasks is never a bad idea. We DMs have enough on our plate already.

An important tool for immersion

Music can greatly support immersion during play. This might be even more important during online RPG play, when we don’t have the environment of our fellow players around the gaming table. The Discord bot Hydra is the easiest method I have found to bring the immersive power of music to an online RPG session.

Links & Resources

Hydra bot – https://hydra.bot/
Discord app – https://discord.com/
“highway1024”, a Spotify user with a vast collection of RPG soundtrack playlists – https://open.spotify.com/user/highway1024