To set my mood and get me excited for gaming,I glean from a few key sources. One of those sources is actually music. I've always had a great love for it and in college was fortunate enough to work as a dj at the campus radio station. While the programs I ran were primarily focused on diy music and lesser known bands, my intro and outro music was The Bridge of'Khazad-Dûm from Howard Shore's excellent soundtrack to the (imho barely accurate) LOTR films. Eventually I got requests to 'play more epic symphonic stuff' and ended up with a fair knowledge of fantasy film soundtracks, video game music, and the like.
One of the best sources I've had the pleasure of listening to for quite a number of years is the stream from
www.radiorivendell.com. They used to play a lot more commercial fantasy music but got a 'cease and desist' from Big Music Industry and now it's mostly diy stuff just to be safe. On the plus side they're really dedicated to finding new and upcoming artists all the time so it's a good resource for finding someone you like and then leaping from there to order their records (or in modern parlance, dl their itunes).
Additionally I listen to a lot of folk music and fantasy inspired metal (hardly surprising amirite?) such as The Tolkien Ensemble (tolkien-ensemble.net), Summoning (
http://www.summoning.info/)
,Hammers of Misfortune (AWESOME people and an incredibly talented band
http://www.hammersofmisfortune.com/) , Bolt Thrower (a death metal band around since roughly 1987 who were inspired by the Warhammer gaming lore, sure it sounds like a cheesy concept but most of their fans don't even know that because they focus on the music
www.boltthrower.com) and while I certainly don't expect everyone here to get something from all of these bands, I hope that it inspires some folk.
I also have a penchant for listening to a lot of Irish folk music when rping Dwarves, it just seems natural.
