If you’ve spent any time with me, you’ve no doubt had to sit through info dumps on my Dungeons & Dragons characters: my shapeshifter journalist bard Roman, my amnesiac halfling ranger Atlas, my brooding British elven gunslinger Nova. And since my professors can’t take another 16-page paper about this stupid fantasy game, I thought I’d bring this to The DePaulia! Another captive audience! My Spotify library shelves creak under the weight of playlist after playlist, so I pulled the best for you — a glimpse into my weekly escape from reality.
“Kid” by Noah Floersch
To understand my bard, you need to understand that I built this character as a massive self-insert during my freshman year of college. I had big ideas and big dreams of putting words on the page and changing lives, and I imbued those ideas and dreams into a literal fantasy journalist looking to uproot corruption. But it took me a year to realize that in the real world, the journalism beat wasn’t for me. Instead, I found a home in the writing, rhetoric & discourse department where I harnessed my smarts into skills I can employ, and I brush up my journalism chops in The DePaulia office. Noah Floersch’s “Kid” reminds me that it takes heart and wit to make a change — traits I like to think I had or have honed — and that effort comes with pressure, but ultimately I can decide if it’s worth it. I think it always will be.
“Interdimensional” by Cosmo Sheldrake
The first time I listened to “Interdimensional,” I knew it had to go on my ranger’s playlist. A halfling teleported across the planes (or dimensions, if you will), only to land on a remote island and begin losing her memory of who she was? She deserves a song about the loss of identity that’s littered with found sounds in nature. I’ve always been mesmerized by Sheldrake’s ability to blend soundbites from nature into his compositions. But the message of “Interdimensional” resonates in more than one way: I, too, fragment myself. I lose myself in divided projections that I call characters. But they always come back together like a puzzle, for “I was whole, indivisible.”
“Denim Jacket” by Sammy Rae & The Friends
When I was building my gunslinger Nova, my only goal was to make a goth cowboy. And the piece that ties her red-and-black look together is her duster. It completes the vibe, and it’s a blanket that keeps her calm, that offsets her dumped charisma score. Her duster is her bulletproof denim jacket. I have my own as well: a black Old Navy denim jacket covered in enamel pins and iron-on patches. I run cold, and sometimes I just want to hide in a fandom shroud, so I’ll pull out my jacket, and bam! She keeps me warm, and the pins make a great conversation starter. It’s just a little something that makes me feel like myself even when I lose my tact, socially speaking. Bulletproof, fireproof, foolproof.
“The Gravedigger and the Nightingale” by Everybody’s Worried About Owen
Surprise! This one isn’t about my own characters, but about the campaign I run! I’ve decided that Everybody’s Worried About Owen’s album “Nunemaker’s Swingset” is the soundtrack for my Tyranny of Dragons campaign, but “The Gravedigger and the Nightingale” specifically captures the grit of the party: the screw-it attitude and crazed jamming is exactly how I feel when my party decides to ignore the plot to go to a fighting ring or flirt with an NPC to avoid a fight. So to Rowan, Cass, Aster, Viola and Nya: thank you for the chaos. Perhaps Tiamat will spare you in the end.
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