Honestly, I hope this thread never dies!! What a good episode! What a great conversation! Thanks to y'all for all the good recommendations. I'm going to need to re-read the OSR article a few times to fully appreciate it, but, personally, I think Dave Arneson is to blame. Before he touched DnD, it was only really Chainmail, only really a Risk-for-ne'er-grown-ups strategy game. Sadly the internet is full of misinformation here, but try to check out the original, paper supplements. This one (which needs the other original DnD publications to make sense mathematically, but can at least be read narratively stadalone) https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17172/ODD-Supplement-II-Blackmoor-0e (fair-warning, that is just plain Old School (OS), not Old School Revival (OSR). IMO it was from there that the Appendix N (https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-appendix-n/ ) was really born, and it's from there that Lovecraft, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, and all the others came pouring in like a flood. (Check out Lindsay's almost unbearably weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Voyage_to_Arcturus , he invents (among a metric ton of other things) a couple of colors, Jale and Ulfire, that Arneson references).
Although, in recent years, I've been much less active in reading RPGs (trying, instead, to write a very-few), one very notable exception from these ranks of the weird is the high-Atlantean priest Klarkash-Ton (or, as we know him IRL, Clark Ashton Smith). This is probably because his stories, as a whole, were a bit to risque... wouldn't want to set off a satanic panic now, would we, Mr. Gygax... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic#Conspiracy_theories "n 1985, Patricia Pulling joined forces with psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence, to create B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). Pulling and B.A.D.D. saw role-playing games generally and Dungeons & Dragons specifically as Satanic cult recruitment tools, inducing youth to suicide, murder, and Satanic ritual abuse"...
Whoops!
Anyway, Klarkash-Ton was apparently a heavy metal boss and this game based on his stories definitely deserves some consideration: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/303704/BLACK-VOID-FREE-Quickstart (I've read the whole core book a time or two... it's undeniably cool, but also very complex, at least on the first few read-throughs, so, I'm linking just the free quickstart).
Really, I think the more well-made RPG's folks can invent, the better. For me, the attraction of Dunsany, Nesbit, James, Lindsay, Edwards, Oliphant, Edwards, Wharton, Lovecraft, Vance, Verne, Wells, Leiber, Moorcock,Ellison, Link, Keirnan, and Russel ... was always the chance that, at least via imagination, we might enter their worlds.
My best to you all! See you there! :)