Noctis Labyrinth's Weird Fantasy is viewed through the lens of Science-Fantasy. After years of fantasy gaming, I had grown tired of traditional tolkienesque aesthetics, so a shift in genre was a welcomed respite from elves and dragons. In addition. I feel like trad-fantasy is so ingrained in TTPRGs, that it is harder to create a piece of Weird Fantasy from that angle: players are so used to trad-fantasy tropes, they would probably have a difficult time turning it Weird instead of supporting themselves on established genre conventions out of habit. Which is fine, but it isn't Weird (more on the importance of Weird Fantasy later).

At the time when I was writing the original Noctis Labyrinth (around 2014-15) I was riding high on the waves of Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea Cycle and other pulp authors, Moebius art (particularly in the documentary for Jodorowsky's Dune), Fallout 2, and—closer to this version of Noctis Labyrinth—falling in love with the art of Quique Alcatena. Fiction from the 30's all through the 80s was a nice walk through an era when the lines between Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and even Horror were blurred; not because they mashed the genres together, but because the genres themselves were ill defined enough for an overlap to happen organically. An era when Fantasy didn't have a particular look, so we got a more diverse perspective on the fantasy imaginarium, from the ridiculous to the surreal.

Science-Fantasy offered me contrast: between the speculative and the esoteric, between the grounded and the fantastical, between chromed metal and psychedelic magick. And in the blurring limits of that contrast, the opportunity to build something new blooms at the table.

Which leads me to Gonzo play. Gonzo has been a term that gained some traction in recent years, and I've thrown around without a clear definition of what constitutes the Gonzo genre in TTRPGs, so I'll give a personal definition:

Gonzo RPGs are games that double-down on the anachronistic, genre-bending, post-modern aspects of play culture by presenting the bizarre end product of play with a semblance of internal consistency. The personal experience of play gets calcified as worldbuilding, and presented with a heightened bizarre aesthetic.

Gonzo relates to the original term, in that it exposes and commodifies a personal experience that can only happen in (and probably only makes sense to) the privacy of a play group. Gonzo cannot be prescriptive, or, when a game presents itself as Gonzo, it feels like it's trying too hard to be funny and bizarre. Instead, I consider Gonzo to be a lived creative experience viewed from the outside.

This is why I don't define Noctis Labyrinth as Gonzo, but I embrace the Gonzo potential in it. The presentation in Noctis Labyrinth is played straight. I have a very personal, very defined and internally consistent world, but as I mentioned last time, I intentionally withdraw information to create a space where the players build up Weirdness from connecting the dots presented in the text. That space can be Gonzo, but a home-grown Gonzo, an experience that is unique to your table and probably only makes sense to you. And that I consider to be cool.