I've droned on an on about the importance of the Weird in other articles, so maybe it's about time I sat down and wrote about it.

We live in a paradoxical world where such an oxymoron as Traditional Fantasy exists. The universalization of certain fantasy works have established a homogenized idea of what a fantasy world "looks like", which is contrary to the very sense of what "fantasy" is. Weird Fantasy grew to be a response to that.

But the thing is, there's another term for Weird Fantasy, it's called: Fantasy.

Over decades, the sense of the fantastical has been moved from the awe-inducing, the mysterious and unknown to a fairly established aesthetic of elves, orcs, spells, castles and dragons. Creating works of Weird Fantasy is taking some of that missed sensibility and injecting it again into the fantasy genre. 

So, how does this relate to Noctis Labyrinth?

The joys and struggles of making a Weird Fantasy RPG

As a collaborative fiction activity, Tabletop RPGs are a perfect medium for Weird Fantasy, as surprising each other is a fundamental part of everyday play—regardless of adherence to a literary genre. Additionally, TTRPGs don't respond to established narrative dynamics, quite the opposite, part of the fun of playing a roleplaying game is to break those expectations and play to find out what happens.

On the other hand, as a game designer, it's not my job to tell a Weird Fantasy story. My job is to give out tools, and create spaces for players at the table to engage Noctis Labyrinth's take on Weird Fantasy, and for them to make it their own. But as I pointed out before, it's easy to fall for the trappings of creating a disjointed compilation of "weird-sounding cool stuff" and call it a day. 

The Weird—the sense of weirdness—doesn't benefit from cheap subversions, or gratuitous aesthetization. It benefits from establishing different layers of opaqueness between what we know as players at the table, and what our characters discover inside the game world. As those layers of opaqueness become gradually transparent, in the in-between degrees of transparency, there's where the Weird happens.

At full opacity you only have ignorance. Through questioning (a fundamental activity of roleplay) you gain transparency, glimpses of what's behind, albeit still tinted with the color of doubt. You may, eventually, get a clear view of what's behind, and there's the moment when player-knowledge and character-knowledge align: the fictional object is integrated into an established aspect of the world, and then can be used by players to build new fictional objects going forward. It's from the process of learning about the Weird, internalizing it and then playing with it, that a virtuous cycle of wonderment is created, where once you've found the weird-thing, and know the weird-thing, you can use the weird-thing to interact with other weird-things you've discovered, to build unexpected results.

You onboard the group in the process of creating the Weird, instead of showing them the Weird and wait for their response. An anecdotal example:

Snerkum, a duplicitous fighter, headlocks a quetzatcoatlus. With the help of the party, they capture the creature, and the player asks me if it is possible to domesticate it. Now, it is established that Red Nomads herd triceratops, so domesticating a quetzatcoatlus isn't beyond the realm of possibility, so I say yes, but it's gonna take time. This becomes Snerkum's personal quest.
More adventuring happens, in which Snerkum and his companions fall into a Sigil of Oblivion trap. This will become relevant later.
Sessions go by, with Snerkum dragging the quetzatcoatlus through the Labyrinth. They finally return to Cardea, and seek refuge in the School of Seven Specters to cash their reward.
Since we enter a lull in the game, I ask Snerkum's player what he wants to do with his new animal companion. And since they are being hosted by the School of Seven Spectres, he asks me (and the wizard player) if they have any way to help taming the quetzatcoatlus.
Now, we know that the wizards have developed the Seal of Oblivion, a spell that is described as: 

This implies that wizards have at least rudimentary knowledge of how a brain works. So we come up at the table with a brain transfer ritual: Snerkum and the quetzatcoatlus are laid in a slab by the wizard character, and hooked into a strange contraption, that transferred some human intelligence into the beast.

Underlined are bits and pieces that were established in Noctis Labyrinth as a text. It is through those established weird-elements that the weird-objects get combined in unexpected ways. A world where dinosaurs and humans inhabit is stablished, a world where wizards can manipulate neural synapsis is also established, and at the table those two elements got combined by the creativity of the play group.

The importance of the Weird, as a design element, is to create those spaces were the strange and bizarre is welcomed. The elements presented in the text establish a precedent of how weird you can get and facilitate other weird fantasy explorations in that fictional space.

I know that in my mind the Fungoid found in page 15 has grown out of the brain of an ancient explorer, got fed by their dreams, and in its rudimentary sentience created desert demons to protect and provide it. I also know that in my mind the history of Noctis Labyrinth actually starts in a secret ritual at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. And I wrote Noctis Labyrinth informed by those ideas, even if none of those ideas are in the text.

The result is that the reader can sense that there are several layers of different degrees of opacity between what they read and the world of Noctis Labyrinth. I don't create a pre-digested version of the Weird. I present an implied setting, where ultimately, what's on my mind is irrelevant, but the exercise of trying to explore, and gleam through the opaque layers that are presented in the text through play, creates a virtuous cycle of weirdness.