A good part of the magic of D&D is from a specific aesthetic effect it shares with several other types of fiction that I'm going to call The Theory of the Labyrinth.
It's this:
So theres
- The Known
- The Unknown, and
- The Labyrinth.
The Known is like: so you go to Boston, you see a statue of a man in the town square. Who is it? George Washington. Easy to know who that is, why he has a statue here, what it means. You eventually ignore it because its so familiar and easy to understand, it's as unremarkable as a chair--despite the remarkableness of George Washington as a figure.
The Unknown is, like, you go to the desert and see Newspaper Rock. This is the Unknown. No-one will ever be able to explain all these glyphs, painted across centuries, they are forever a mystery. Intriguing and a spur to the imagination but ultimately you know you will never understand it the way you do the George Washington. You won't' access the lives of the people who made them, you won't be able to see what this meant to them--it is -unknown-and also, to a certain degree, not-knowable. It is from a time with no written records and oral traditions conflict.
Then there's The Labyrinth:
You go to Croatia or something. You're in a tiny village. There's a statue of a man on a horse. You are with a French friend, a Spanish friend, you ask them "Who is the man on a horse?" they shrug.
Now you know this:
That guy has a name--you don't know it but he does. You can ask around and go to some archives and find out who he is, why he is important, what he did in this tiny village, this is --you know-- technically all knowable despite the fact it reaches into the distant past.
You don't know if it'll mean anything or be relevant once you find out--you also don't know if you do the work to find out whether it'll just go in one ear and out the other. You don't know how connected it is to your current concerns (perhaps not at all, perhaps very much so) , but you know that it is both real and--to you--unknown. You -could- find out. And this weird in-the-middle space is where megadungeons live. Even for the DM--they can't take it all in just by reading it, they can't say how it'll play, it always represents more knowledge than a person can hold in their head. So it is an object of eternal fascination, even once it's explored.
It is a Rabbit Hole. You can go down it. There is definitely -something- there.
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Although The Labyrinth effect requires reference to the past, it is (in my reading, anyway) most common in modern authors who marvel at the complexity of the past as an aesthetic effect in itself.
Labyrinth-aesthetics in literature are frequently the result of an American author with a culture that has a long(er) and less morally-legible recorded history. The author from the younger country is more capable of being dazzled by the vastness of these functionally-infinite stories.
So: Thomas Pynchon encounters Europe and the tangled international histories that lead to WW2 in his labyrinthine novel Gravity's Rainbow.
Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges encounters the world of Old Europe inside his library and explores bookishly infinite imagined pasts in his short stories.
William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith also partake on occasion--though their fascinations often lie further east.
And, of course, Gary Gygax, Arneson and co encounter versions of European history (via fantastic fiction and realistic wargames) and turns it into D&D, a great engine of infinitely explorable, infinitely interconnected histories.
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(I don't know about Tolkien. British but mazy. He always seemed to exert a storytellerish mastery over his fiction where you got the feeling he knew what every stray reference was to. I think his references to the deep time of his setting were to give a feeling of myth rather than an unknown of tangled obscurity.)
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I am tempted to wonder if this is one of the few clear advantages D&D's fictional background has over Warhammer's--the British authors at Games Workshop were happy to detail for you what life was like for everyone and exactly who all the bad guys were and what they were about (the better to make playable, legible factions), whereas D&D always pointed to ragged edges of the unknown--a lich is what now? The rakshasa is from India? How do you get there in Greyhawk? What is the Invoked Devastation? Who is Vecna and why are we only speaking of him in whispers?
The unfinished quality of the game fiction had a tacit flipside: if you played the game long enough you'd find out.
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