Well, it kind of depends on the genre, doesn't it? I mean, when I'm doing a wuxia game, mainlining Power Metal videos is probably counter-intuitive, right? Pair the inspiration with the need, says I.
Okay, that's kind of a flippant answer, but I do have a better one for the genre I do best.
When it comes to my Supers games, for many years my primary inspiration has been animated superhero shows.
While watching "Batman: the Animated Series" on a daily basis during a period of unemployment in the mid-90s, something just clicked. Even though I'd been running successful supers games for over a decade by that point, it was like discovering an entirely new language. I developed what I call my "Champions: the Animated Series" approach to playing the game. Studying the show and it's successors ("The Adventures of Superman," and my beloved "JLA"), I learned the ins and outs of how they stripped characters down to their iconic core and used that to tell stories.
Since then, pretty much every supers game I run is an animated series or movie in my head. It's how I visualize the action, it's how I describe things. It's my GMing vocabulary.
My game have been compared to a tv series in style.
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