First, the wonderful nerd blog io9 posted this.

As someone whose free time revolves around metal and gaming, I wanted to comment.

First off, I'm going to suggest gaming ambiance for an upcoming cast episode.  Music will be in that episode.  Stay tuned for that.  Generally, I think music at the table is great.  There's three ways to approach it:

1) Game motivated (I did this when I GM'ed SOTC).  This means that when the GM says "you guys are in a jazz club," jazz music plays.

2) Atmosphere.  This would be quieter music played to set the mood.

3) Music driven gaming.  This is what that article seems to be getting at.  "We're going to be doing a sweet dungeon crawl so put on some Sabbath, dude."

Now, onto the post.

First off- Rainbow?  Seriously.  Rainbow?  I mean, I love Dio and all, but... RAINBOW?  And while we're at it... DEEP PURPLE?  What are we, a junior high marching band?

Okay.  Having said that, The Sword and 3 Inches of Blood are SWEET choices for some good fantasy-themed metal.  I would also suggest A Band of Orcs (who are a literal band of orcs), Armory, Powerwolf, Doomsword, While Heaven Wept, and Amon Amarth.  That's for dungeon crawl kind of music, though.  For more atmospheric stuff, I would go with any good instrumetal band such as Latitudes, Tides, Tomydeepestego, or Conifer.  My PERSONAL music preferences, though, are more towards atmospheric and ambient music.  Mono is good, SunnO))) is good, but my personal favorite music to use is Clint Mansell's soundtracks, particularly the soundtrack to Moon.

Right now, I'm planning to use Morricone when I run a Dust Devils campaign and Earth when I run a Deadlands campaign.

To me, music should set the mood.  It's really going to depend on what you're doing, I suppose.  I tend more towards instrumental stuff, so we can talk over it, but some part of me is REAL into the idea of running a sweet dungeon crawl or straight up hard sci-fi laser fight with some good fantasy or death metal blasting.  No talking required- just rocking and rolling (see what I did there?).

So yeah.  Keep your ears open for a (hopefully) future podcast that brings this topic up.

-Todd