Northeast Dungeon Siege 2024

On the last weekend of March, fans of dungeon synth music descended on Worcester, Massachusetts for Northeast Dungeon Siege. Dungeon synth is a genre of ambient music that takes its inspiration from fantasy novels and roleplaying games. While it has been around since the early 1990s, it has recently become more well known, perhaps due to the increasing popularity of fantasy films and roleplaying games. Northeast Dungeon Siege is a small music festival dedicated to dungeon synth that has been running since 2018. My friends Steve (@sovthofheaven) and Gage (@noclearcoat) were running some miniature gaming sessions at the festival, and I was fortunate enough to come along and help out. Steve has a gaming fanzine called Under the Dice which he was promoting, along with a miniature-based gaming podcast called Hive Scum that he runs with Gage and some other friends. As readers of the blog will know, I have become more and more enamored by ambient music in recent years and have spent a sizable amount of time listening to dungeon synth in 2023. As such, I was very excited to attend Northeast Dungeon Siege.

The festival was held at a music venue called The Raven, named after Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem.

Gage (left) and Steve (right) are getting excited about the prospect of standing for the next 6 hours, one of the many joys of attending music festivals.

One of the performances that I was most looking forward to was DIM, a musical project from Nova Scotia which eschews the forlorn nature of a lot of dungeon synth to make music that is hopeful and, dare I say, joyous. 

More to come shortly!