Sword & Sorcery Old School

Crypts & Things
Around 1970, back when the authors of White Box were reading books that may have inspired them to add elements borrowed from fantasy/science fiction to their medieval wargaming, sword & sorcery titles including the works of Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Lin Carter, Fritz Leiber, Gardner F. Fox and others which could be found in drug stores and locally owned bookstores alongside hard-science fiction, detective novels, comic books and magazines provided much of the inspiration. The cover illustrations often feature a warrior facing enormous odds, either in terms of numbers or the size of the monster foe. As in the above cover illustration, there is often a female "sidekick". Genre figures are generally scantily clad, suggesting a warm climate and swords outnumber guns. The main protagonist rarely uses magic, although the "sidekick" sometimes does.
Many of the adventure stories found in sword & sorcery tomes involve discovery of ancient tombs, crypts, ruins or other artifacts - evidence that the history of intelligent life is far older than we generally believe. Humans play a prominent role (no elves, dwarves, or hobbits), although "things" certainly exist which seem strange, fantastic or mind-wrenching, utterly horrible. The sword & sorcery tale, together with the more recent fantasy of Professor Tolkien and his imitators, together  combined with elements drawn from other adventure stories set in our own world, all came together in the White Box adventure game written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The authors brought together things they liked from history, fiction, cinema, and other popular media of their day to create a game that included something of them all, but was not just like anything else.

Swords & Wizardry is one of the more popular OSR tributes to the original game rules (White Box). Swords & Wizardry (S&W) Complete includes a lot of the material from the 1st edition of the Advanced game, although the core mechanics may hold more true to the LBBs plus Supplement I. S&W is its own beast, veering away from a strict copying of any single previous game in ways like having a single Saving Throw rather than several "Save verses..."  S&W, like the Original Game and the Advanced Game includes enough of swords & sorcery, enough of Tolkienesque fantasy, enough of fairy tales and the legendary and mythical history of popular culture for the referee to arguably modify the game to fit almost any style of play or setting. It is open-ended. S&W is a bit "generic" in terms of fantasy role-play gaming. (Although one could make an argument that by default D&D creates a unique setting of its own by its inherent inclusions and exclusions, and therefor S&W shares that implied/default setting.)
Crypts & Things takes the basic game engine of S&W and modifies it to produce a system specifically tailored to its sword & sorcery setting, Zarth: The Continent of Terror. Crypts & Things is both core rulebook and setting sourcebook for The Continent of Terror. By adjusting the available character classes, alignment and especially magic (White, Grey, and Black) and by adding in sanity and corruption and some dark deities, and by populating the wilderness and underground with a unique set of monsters (including snakemen sorcerers), Crypts & Things feels a bit more like the pulpy swords & sorcery genre than does S&W or older, original versions of the game.