I've been thinking a bit about Appendix N and how I got into reading for fun because of D&D.

What's interesting is thst while I didn't stick around AD&D for long, it absolutely ruined fantasy for me. Lord of the Rings was never as cool as the content of a D&D session and I remember when the New Weird became a thing and fantasy authors started blending SF and Fantasy I just thought of all those 1970s D&D modules with UFOs in them.

A lot of grimdark was dudes writing about their old campaigns.

Conversely, I look at a lot of OSR stuff and I a) don't think the worlds are more interesting than books, and b) I don't think they're as interesting as those old D&D modules were at the time.

A lot of OSR modules have settings that feel self-consciously derivative while also being so optimised for play that they don't feel real and so are not evocative for me, but then I know that I do tend to run worlds rather than games and OSR stuff is very gamey.

The gameyness is interesting as something like Troika is pure 'lol random' held in place by procedural mechanics.

I would rather run Fatal than Troika because Fatal has a world (dogfuck rapeworld admittedly) while Troika has tables.

Very much a me-and-my-brain thing. Mileages vary, obviously.

I found Troika had enough of a world to latch onto when my group played it. It's one of those things where there is a lot of drive by lore in the class descriptions etc. The negative for me is that Troika modules (like all NSR) tend to be linear / railroady with the tables as a gloss over that. But the game itself is good I think, and if you don't like the system it's still a fine gonzo setting for B/X.