My Appendix LP Album Playlist

I started making an "Appendix LP" playlist after the supplement Iron Falcon 75 by Chris Gonnerman dropped at the end of December 2022.

It's hard to describe this module without spoilers. Roughly I think an elevator pitch might be Stranger Things, but with adults in the 1970s. The content itself, unsurprisingly, takes place in 1975. Why 1975? Because that's when we have the thief from the Greyhawk OD&D supplement.

I found it really inspiring, both the concept and the setups in the book and found myself wanting to be able to run a great campaign, and part of this was finding music to go along with it.

Imagine a semi-finished basement in the Midwest. It is the end of summer 1975. The nicotine stained wood paneling, like the shag carpet underfoot, is a medley of earthy oranges and browns, each thread bears witness to countless family gatherings, holding tight the remnants of RC Cola "pop" stains and the occasional cigarette burn. If there was a TV it probably had dials on it, and maybe even tuned into the UHF band. This was if you were lucky.

Let's imagine a 1975 record collection that a teenager who lives in this house might have access to. Let's assume both that this family is really generous with their birthday and Christmas gifts, and that this teenager had an older brother who would have had records from the dawn of the 70s. This kid decides to run a D&D game, and wants to have music on while playing. They need to fill 4 hours, and since we're using vinyl, that means you need at least 5 records lined up, and they're going to have to be flipped every 22-25 minutes at max.

So what do we have? Well today we'd call it "Classic Rock". A blend of prog rock, hard rock, psychedelic rock, as well as some folk revival stuff floating around. This is what I got to enjoy on the classic rock stations around Chicago in the 1990s.

But I'm going to be honest, when I found a tone emerging among the selections that appealed to the vintage Sword & Sorcery and Weird Fiction nerd in me, we end up with a strong Prog Rock bent.

I found a tone emerged in all the albums I was curating in this list. That tone starts in roughly 1970 and is still going very strong by 1975. The only arbitrary constraints on the project were that albums were released by the end of summer 1975 (though this later put me in uncomfortable positions with some albums that just obviously belong).

Even with there being no lower limit to the release year, a natural boundary of 1970 emerged. There are various reasons for this, which I plan to explore in a later post, but to sum it up, there were a lot of cultural changes and shifts in the music industry at the end of the 1960s that changed the general tone and what people expected from commercial music.

While I need to do a count of how how many albums are in there, the playlist clocks in at 50hr 28min, and has 614 tracks.

You can check out the most up-to-date version on Spotify. A playlist called "OD&D '75":

open.spotify.com/playlist/22KV3RQ6eROCk…

There is also a YouTube playlist version here.