Between Gygax and Kafka: The Dungeon as Existential Space in OSR Games
“The OSR dungeon is (as opposed to a mythologically conceived dungeon) about the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar world with no guarantees, a place where they don’t care whether you can “get it” and that the only option for how to occupy this corridor is to endure it. From this perspective, I would actually argue that there is another layer. And that the OSR dungeon is somewhere between Gary Gygax’s pragmatic wargaming approach and the quiet horror of meaninglessness that Franz Kafka evokes in the reader.”
