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The Frequency

A Setting for Bound
"I watched a thousand people cry at the same moment,
in the same key, for the same reason I chose for them.
They thanked me afterward. That's the part I can't forgive." — unnamed session musician, last interview

The WorldThe Sound Beneath the Sound

The modern world. Your world. Music has always shaped reality — every revolution had a soundtrack, every movement rode a wave of sound, every tyrant understood that the right anthem turns a crowd into a weapon. Most people feel it as goosebumps, as tears at a concert, as a mood shift they didn't consent to. A song comes on in a coffee shop and the whole room softens. A bassline hits at a protest and the crowd becomes a fist. Everyone feels it. Almost no one hears what's underneath.

Beneath the music is the Frequency — the layer where genres aren't styles but living forces, older than the instruments that channel them. Blues predates the guitar. Metal predates the amp. Electronic predates the circuit. The instruments are just the latest vessels for something that has existed since the first human made sound with intent — a rhythm beaten on a hollow log, a melody hummed to soothe a dying friend, a war cry that made ten people feel like a hundred. The genres were there before anyone named them. Naming them just made them louder.

People who hear the Frequency can tap in. They make Contracts with genres — not metaphorical, not with record labels or industry executives — with the genre itself. The genre grants power. The genre demands you play by its rules. And through you, the genre touches the world in ways that no ordinary performance can.

Who You Are

Musicians, DJs, producers, street performers, choir directors, bedroom artists, sound engineers, the person who hums while they work and doesn't know why the room changes when they do. Anyone who has heard the Frequency and answered. You move through the modern world carrying power that looks like talent, charisma, or presence — but is actually something much older using you as a speaker.

Daily Life

You have a day job, an apartment, friends who don't know. You play gigs, write songs, produce tracks, DJ sets at bars that pay in drink tickets. Between the mundane, the Frequency hums — in the rattle of a subway car, in the feedback whine of a speaker left on, in the rhythm of rain on a fire escape. And when you channel it, when you play with intent, reality listens. A chord progression can rewrite the emotional landscape of a room. A drumbeat can synchronize the heartbeats of everyone in earshot. A melody can plant a feeling so deep the listener thinks it was always theirs.

The Central Horror You can change what people feel. Not with argument, not with proof — with sound. A chord progression that rewrites grief into acceptance. A bassline that turns a crowd from passive to furious. A melody that makes someone fall in love with a stranger. The genres gave you this power because music is how they touch the world, and the world reshapes itself around what it hears. The horror is not what the music does to you. It is what you do to everyone else — and how easy it becomes to stop asking permission.

ThemesWhat This Setting Is About

Influence You change people. Not by convincing them — by rewriting what they feel. The line between inspiration and manipulation is a line you crossed three songs ago.
Authenticity The genres reward genuine expression. But genuine expression channeled through a living force becomes something engineered. When the crowd weeps at your song, are they weeping because it's true, or because the Frequency made it impossible not to?
Volume The world is saturated with sound. Ads, algorithms, playlists, background music in every space. The genres are everywhere, shaping reality in small ways all the time. Your power isn't unique. It's just louder.
Silence The absence of music. The one place where people are free from influence — including yours. Silence is terrifying because in it, you hear what the world sounds like without your interference.

Setting RulesThe Mix

The Reverb Track

Every character has a Reverb Track with five boxes. Reverb is the cumulative weight of reality you've rewritten with your music — every mood you've shifted, every feeling you've planted, every choice you've made for someone who didn't know they weren't choosing. You mark a box when:

Reverb Triggers
  1. You use your Grant to alter someone's emotions or behavior without their knowledge.
  2. You Go Live (see below).
  3. You use music to override someone's free will — making them act against their own interests.
  4. You discover a change you made has persisted and caused harm, and you do nothing about it.
Reverb Thresholds At three boxes — The Echo: your changes stop fading. Reality doesn't snap back after your performances anymore. That crowd you calmed? They're calm about everything now — they don't protest, don't fight, don't care. That couple your love song brought together? Still together, and it wasn't their choice. Your music has left permanent marks on the world, and you can see them everywhere. The GM names one change that has persisted and grown beyond what you intended. At five boxes — The Broadcast: you've rewritten so much that the world around you isn't natural anymore — it's your composition. Everyone nearby harmonizes with your Frequency whether they chose to or not. Your final scene: confronting what you've made. You can keep broadcasting — become a living signal that overwrites reality permanently, a walking concert that never ends — or go silent: lose your power forever, let the world heal, live with the knowledge of what you did. The horror isn't what happened to you. It's what you did to everyone else.

Clearing Reverb

You can erase one Reverb box through undoing. Finding something your music changed and helping it find its own voice again — the person whose grief you rewrote, the neighborhood whose mood you shifted, the friend who loves a song you planted in their head. This is not a quick fix. You have to be present for the recovery, and you cannot use music to speed it along. The Frequency got you into this. Only silence gets you out.

Alternatively, another player can Cut the Feed (see below).

The Green Room

At the start of each session, the table enters the Green Room. This is not a literal place — it is the moment before the performance, when the masks are off. The GM asks each player:

The Opening Question "What do you listen to when no one's around?"

Each player names one piece of music that's just for them — not their genre's music, not a performance, not power. A guilty pleasure. A childhood song. A track they'd never play for anyone. This is the human underneath the performer. It should change from session to session, because the human underneath changes too.

Cutting the Feed

When a character is drifting — racking up Reverb, using their Grant casually, forgetting that the people they affect didn't ask to be affected — another player can Cut the Feed.

They hold up a mirror: describe, specifically, what the character's music has done to someone. Not accusation. Honesty. "That bartender at the last gig? She quit her job the next day. She doesn't know why. You do."

The character clears 1 Reverb box. The player Cutting the Feed must have witnessed the damage — they can't make it up. And it costs them: they have to be present in the world their friend's music made. See the dents. Hear the silence where someone's real feelings used to be.

This is the thesis: the only thing that stops you from reshaping the world unchecked is someone who cares enough to make you look at what you've done.

Going LiveThe Sound and the Fury

Performance is where the Frequency is loudest. Any character can channel their Grant quietly — a hummed melody that shifts a mood, a rhythm tapped on a table that steadies a shaking hand, a chord played softly in an empty room to feel the genre's presence. But when a character performs — publicly, for an audience, with intent — they Go Live.

Going Live While Live, Grant rolls gain +1d6. Mark 1 Reverb box. The GM gains one Reverb — a permanent change to reality caused by the performance. The GM describes what the music did to the audience, the street, the neighborhood. It should be specific and consequential: not "the crowd felt happy" but "the couple in the third row stopped fighting — permanently. They don't remember what they were angry about. They don't remember being angry at all."

When the performance ends, each performer answers: "What did you change, and did you mean to?"
Scaling Small venue (dive bar, street corner, house show): +1d6, 1 Reverb box, 1 Reverb.
Large venue (theater, festival, broadcast, livestream): +2d6, 2 Reverb boxes, 2 Reverbs.

The math is simple and cruel. The bigger the audience, the more power you have and the more damage you do. Every musician who hears the Frequency faces the same temptation: play louder, play bigger, reach more people. The genre wants you to. The crowd wants you to. The only person who should be saying no is you.

The GenresPatrons of the Frequency

Genres are living forces — older than any instrument, older than recording, older than notation. They existed the moment a human first made sound with intent. They are not metaphors. They are entities that need to be performed to touch the world, and they choose their performers the way fire chooses fuel. Each genre offers three Grants and three Bindings. A player chooses one Grant and one Binding, then writes their own Grey. The genres below are not the only ones — the Frequency carries countless voices — but they are the loudest.

Blues
The Ache That Sings

The oldest sound in the room. Blues was here before anyone named it — in work songs, in field hollers, in the sound a person makes when they have nothing left but their voice. It does not perform suffering. It transmutes it — takes the weight of lived experience and makes it resonate until other people feel it in their chests. It smells like cigarette smoke in an empty bar and tastes like whiskey that's been sitting too long. Its sacred places are juke joints with sticky floors, late-night diners where the waitress knows your name, and any room where someone is crying alone and not asking anyone to fix it.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Testimony When you speak or sing truth, people hear sincerity — and cannot dismiss it.
The Burden Pain cannot break you. You carry sorrow the way a river carries stones — worn smooth, never stopped.
The Reading You can hear the sorrow in others — the specific shape of what they've lost, what they carry, what they won't say.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Witness You shall not perform what you have not felt.
The Vigil You shall not let pain go unwitnessed.
The Audience You shall not play for those who will not listen.
Sample Grey Blues' Greys live in the definition of felt experience. Consider whether empathy counts as feeling, whether imagining counts as living, and where the line falls between witnessing pain and performing it.
Blues' Reckoning is personal and intimate. Narrowing means a new pain is required — your existing suffering is no longer enough to fuel the music, and the genre demands you go deeper. Tithe is a happy memory, simply taken — you wake up and a moment of joy is gone, replaced by the ache of knowing something is missing. Fraying means your music only produces sorrow — you play a love song and the room weeps, you play a celebration and people feel the loss underneath. Severance is emptiness: you feel nothing. Your music moves no one. You play and the room is silent, not because they can't hear you, but because there is nothing left in you to hear.
Metal
The Wall of Sound

Metal is the scream that shakes the foundations. Born in factories and furnaces, channeled through amplifiers that weren't designed to go this loud — and then pushed past the red line because the point was never safety. Metal is not anger. Anger burns out. Metal is defiance — the sustained refusal to be quiet, to comply, to fit in the space someone else made for you. It smells like hot circuits and sweat. It tastes like blood in your mouth after you've been hit and gotten back up. Its sacred places are mosh pits, parking lot shows where the cops are already on their way, and any room where the walls are vibrating hard enough to rattle the pictures off the shelves.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Amp Your sound is force — you can shatter, break, and overwhelm through sheer volume.
The Rally You inspire defiance in others. The afraid become brave. The compliant become dangerous.
The Tank You endure punishment that should destroy you and keep standing.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Challenge You shall not back down from a challenge.
The Volume You shall not play quietly.
The Refusal You shall not obey unjust authority.
Sample Grey Metal's Greys live in the definitions of justice and destruction. Consider what makes authority unjust, where defiance ends and destruction begins, and whether volume is always the answer.
Metal's Reckoning is destructive. Narrowing means a new enemy is required — someone you must defy, another fight you cannot walk away from, another hill to die on. Tithe is something you built — a relationship, a home, a moment of peace — because Metal has no use for comfort. Fraying means your sound destroys indiscriminately: windows shatter when you raise your voice, equipment breaks when you're angry, the people around you flinch at sudden movements. Severance is silence, total and suffocating — not just the loss of your power but the loss of your voice. You cannot yell, cannot scream, cannot even whisper with conviction. The world is loud around you and you are the quietest thing in it.
Jazz
The Note Between Notes

Jazz doesn't repeat. It is the most demanding genre — it requires you to be present in every moment, to hear what's happening and respond without a script. Every measure is a conversation you've never had before. It does not plan. It listens, and in the listening finds the move that no one else saw coming. Jazz smells like brass polish and late-night air. It tastes like the last sip of something strong at 2 AM when the conversation has gone past words into something honest. Its sacred places are smoky clubs where the set never starts on time, rehearsal rooms at hours no one should be awake, and any conversation where no one knows what they'll say next.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Ear You read the room — sensing emotional currents, social patterns, the tension no one is naming.
The Pivot No situation can trap you. You adapt, shift, find the exit that wasn't there until you moved toward it.
The Blue Note You find the hidden option — the move no one considered, the third choice when only two were offered.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Standard You shall not play the same thing twice.
The Improv You shall not follow a plan to the letter.
The Session You shall not refuse a collaboration.
Sample Grey Jazz's Greys live in the definitions of repetition and structure. Consider what constitutes playing the same thing twice, where improvisation ends and chaos begins, and whether a variation is a new thing or the old thing wearing a mask.
Jazz's Reckoning is structural. Narrowing means a new constraint on repetition — the definition tightens until even familiar gestures feel like violations, and you must constantly invent. Tithe is a relationship, because Jazz takes what is stable: a friendship you relied on, a routine that kept you grounded, a certainty you didn't know you needed until it was gone. Fraying means your improvisations become erratic — not brilliant-chaotic but broken-chaotic, unpredictable even to you, your own moves surprising you in ways that are no longer useful. Severance is predictability: you can never surprise again. Every word you speak, every note you play, every choice you make is exactly what everyone expected. You are readable, foreseeable, ordinary. Jazz's worst punishment is making you boring.
Punk
The Three-Chord Truth

Punk is the genre that says the emperor has no clothes — and says it loud enough that the emperor hears. It doesn't need virtuosity. It doesn't need production value. It needs conviction and a willingness to look ridiculous in the service of something real. Three chords and the truth. Punk smells like spray paint and cheap beer. It tastes like the inside of your lip after you've been talking too long and too loud and you're not going to stop. Its sacred places are basements with low ceilings, zine shops that smell like toner, and any space someone claimed without asking permission and turned into something that matters.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Crowd You inspire collective action. People who hear you stop being individuals and start being a movement.
The Bullshit Detector You cut through lies, pretense, and performance. Deception unravels in your presence.
The Spark You empower the powerless. Ordinary people near you become brave, capable, willing to act.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Ethic You shall not profit from your art.
The Underground You shall not perform for those in power.
The Call You shall not let injustice go unnamed.
Sample Grey Punk's Greys live in the definitions of power and profit. Consider what constitutes selling out, who holds power and who doesn't, and where naming injustice becomes self-righteousness.
Punk's Reckoning is communal. Narrowing means a new authority you cannot serve — the definition of "those in power" expands until it includes people you need, people you love, anyone with any leverage at all. Tithe is a comfort, because Punk takes what makes you soft: a warm bed, a reliable income, a relationship where you don't have to fight. Fraying means your rebellion becomes contagious and indiscriminate — people near you reject everything, not just injustice but structure, stability, the things that keep them alive. Severance is complicity: you become invisible to the oppressed, visible only to the powerful. The people you fought for can't see you anymore. The people you fought against can't stop noticing you.
Electronic
The Signal

The youngest genre and the most pervasive. Electronic is the sound of the machine — not hostile, not cold, but networked. It is in every phone, every speaker, every algorithm that chooses what you hear next. It doesn't need a performer in the traditional sense — it can exist in code, in loops, in the ambient hum of a city that never turns off. Electronic is the genre that understood first: music doesn't need a human anymore. It just needs a signal. It smells like ozone and new plastic. It tastes like the static on your tongue before a storm. Its sacred places are server rooms humming in the desert, festival stages at dawn when the crowd has stopped being individuals, and any space where screens outnumber people.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Interface You speak to machines and they answer. Technology responds to your intent.
The Network You sense and manipulate connections — data flows, social webs, the invisible lines between people and systems.
The Drop You synchronize groups of people. Heartbeats align. Movements coordinate. Crowds become one organism.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Uptime You shall not be unreachable.
The Protocol You shall not reject the network.
The Input You shall not act without data.
Sample Grey Electronic's Greys live in the definitions of connection and control. Consider what constitutes a network, where connection becomes surveillance, and whether synchronization is unity or erasure.
Electronic's Reckoning is systemic. Narrowing means a new system you must maintain — another feed to monitor, another connection you cannot sever, another signal you must keep alive. Tithe is privacy: information about you becomes accessible, data you thought was yours surfaces in places it shouldn't, the network knows you better than you know yourself. Fraying means your synchronizations override individual will — people near you move in unison without choosing to, conversations align into the same topic, a room full of strangers starts humming the same melody and none of them know why. Severance is disconnection, total and absolute: no device responds to your touch, no signal carries your voice, no network acknowledges your existence. You are analog in a digital world, and the silence of dead screens is the loneliest sound you've ever heard.
Pop
The Hook That Never Lets Go

Pop is the easiest genre to love and the hardest to take seriously. The other genres know this and resent it — Blues sweats for authenticity, Metal screams for defiance, Punk bleeds for conviction, and Pop walks in wearing something bright, hums four bars, and the whole room is singing along before they've decided to. It does not demand. It does not challenge. It welcomes. That is its power and its horror. Pop smells like bubblegum and new sneakers and the inside of a venue where the lights are always flattering. It tastes like the sweetest thing you've ever had — the one you keep reaching for even though you know it's engineered. Its sacred places are stadiums with perfect acoustics, shopping malls where the playlist never stops, bedroom mirrors where someone is performing for an audience of one and feeling, for the first time, like a star.

Sample Grants — choose one

The Hook You lodge in people's minds. Your words, your ideas, your presence — once encountered, they cannot be put down.
The Shine People like you. Instinctively, immediately, without examining why. Doors open. Suspicion dissolves. You are welcome everywhere.
The Chorus You give people the words they didn't know they needed. Your ideas become their ideas, repeated back as if they'd always believed them.

Sample Bindings — choose one

The Appeal You shall not alienate your audience.
The Smile You shall not show them anything ugly.
The Single You shall not make anything that cannot be understood immediately.
Sample Grey Pop's Greys live in the definition of appeal and accessibility. Consider what it means to alienate — is a hard truth alienating if you deliver it sweetly? Is complexity acceptable if the surface is simple? Where does making something accessible become making something empty?
Pop's Reckoning is insidious because it feels like nothing at all. Narrowing means a new audience you must please — the definition of "your audience" expands until it includes everyone you've ever met, and contradicting any of them is a violation. Tithe is an opinion, a preference, a private conviction — something that makes you you instead of everyone's, quietly surrendered so the appeal stays intact. Fraying means your influence stops being optional: people near you agree with you reflexively, laugh at your jokes before the punchline, mirror your body language without noticing, and none of it is real. Severance is irrelevance — not hatred, not rejection, just the total absence of attention. No one notices you. No one remembers meeting you. You walk through a crowd and leave no impression at all. Pop's worst punishment is not being hated. It is being nothing.

Desperate DealsThe One-Hit Wonders

When a musician cries out — truly, desperately, with nothing left — what answers is not a genre. It is a song. A single, specific, impossibly powerful piece of music that burned through whoever first played it. The 27 Club's last recordings. The protest anthem that toppled a government. The lullaby someone hummed while a city burned. The demo tape that was playing when a studio caught fire. The chord progression that made an entire audience forget their names.

These songs exist in the Frequency as ghosts — too powerful to fade, too dangerous to play again. They answer because they want to be performed one more time. Every great song wants to be heard. These songs want it the way a drowning person wants air.

The Salvation rewrites reality on a scale no genre can match — because these songs already did it once, and they remember how. The Binding is the song's original agenda — it was written for a reason, and now that reason is yours whether you share it or not. A protest anthem binds you to a revolution that ended decades ago. A love song binds you to a passion that consumed the person who wrote it. A funeral dirge binds you to a grief that was never resolved.

The Song in Your Head A Desperate Deal in the Frequency feels like a song stuck in your head that you've never heard before — and it's getting louder. The melody is beautiful. The lyrics are someone else's dying wish. You know, with absolute certainty, that if you play it — if you perform it, just once, in front of an audience — reality will bend to the song's will. The salvation is automatic and total. The cost is that the song's purpose becomes your purpose, and there is no Grey. The one-hit wonder already used up all the ambiguity the first time around.

At the TablePlaying the Frequency

Session Structure

Each session of the Frequency should begin with the Green Room and end with the Setlist. In between, the story is whatever it needs to be — gigs, jobs, confrontations with the damage your music has done, and the quiet moments between performances where you remember what it felt like to just listen.

The Green Room The GM asks each player: "What do you listen to when no one's around?" Each player names one piece of music — their private sound, the song that's just for them. Not their genre. Not power. Just a human being with headphones in, feeling something real.
The Setlist At the end of the session, one player (rotating) names the "tracks" of the session — each major scene titled as a song. The track names become the album, the way the story is remembered. Over time, the campaign builds a discography. The session where Marcus confronted what his music did to the neighborhood becomes Side B, Track 3: "The Block That Forgot How to Be Angry."

Tone Guidance

The Frequency is horror, but it is the horror of influence. Not body horror, not cosmic dread — the specific, modern terror of realizing you can change what people feel without asking, and how easy it becomes to justify. The scariest moments should be quiet: a character walks past someone whose life they changed with a song, and that person doesn't know. A character plays a set and realizes, afterward, that the room felt exactly the way they wanted it to — and nobody in it chose to feel that way.

The Frequency is not cynicism. It is not "all art is manipulation." The genres create genuine beauty, genuine connection, genuine catharsis. A Blues song played honestly can heal a wound that therapy couldn't touch. A Punk show can give a teenager the courage to leave a bad situation. The music is real and it is good. The question is not whether music is good — it is whether your right to play outweighs everyone else's right to feel what they'd feel without you.

What Victory Looks Like

You won't silence the genres. They're as old as rhythm and they will outlast everything you've ever loved. Victory in the Frequency is local and honest: a song played for the right reasons, not to change the audience but to give them something real and let them choose what to do with it. A friend pulled back from the Broadcast. A neighborhood where your Reverb faded and people found their own feelings again. A performance where the crowd sings your words back to you and you know — you know — that they chose to learn the lyrics.

A Note on Sound The Reverb Track is not a punishment for playing music. It is a record of what your music has done to the world — and whether you've been paying attention. The genres are beautiful and terrible. They connect people and rewrite the people they connect. The game lives in the tension between the thrill of a crowd singing your words back to you and the knowledge that some of them didn't choose to learn the lyrics. Give your players moments of genuine musical joy. Let them feel the high of a perfect set, the rush of a crowd moving together, the intimacy of a song played for one person in a quiet room. Then, gently, show them what happened after they left the stage. That moment — the morning after the gig, when the world is different and it's your fault — is the whole game.
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Bound — The Frequency v0.1
A Setting of Sound & Influence