Weird Fantasy 1 A Dialog with Anti-Canon

Designing a Weird Fantasy game requires a special approach towards presentation. A TTRPG's text purpose is to explain the game. So how do you explain Weirdness? 

While developing Noctis Labyrinth, I found a lot of my design affinities could be described as "Anti-Canon", a term I first encountered in conversations around Luka Rejec's article (a recommended read). Now, Anti-Canon is not new, it is a term that describes what a lot of groups already did since the beginnings of the hobby, and it has been an established practiced in roleplaying games for quite a while; the most influential to me being Apocalypse World's "play to find out what happens":

[...] It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not fucking around).
- Apocalypse World 1ed. p 108. (Emphasis mine).

What Anti-Canon did do was codifying this practice under an umbrella term that people (mainly revolving around the OSR sphere) could use to explain their design preferences, in contrast to a landscape that historically assumes encyclopedic writing, lore mining, and GMing-as-conworlding. It was comforting to find conversations about the plastic nature of campaign settings, and knowing that other people shared some of my design preferences.

But what I also perceived was that Anti-Canon was coagulating with another aspect of the OSR design sphere: random tables. Anti-Canon seemed to become synonymous with presenting a tons of short, flavorful, table entries for groups to pick at various degrees of consistency to whim. I started feeling like Anti-Canon—just like random tables—became complimentary gimmicks. The Unexpected replaced Mystery, which turned into a shorthand for the Weird, when in actuality, they're related but distinctly different things.

Noctis Labyrinth is very much an Anti-Canon game, while pointedly avoiding random tables as a way to convey the Weird. My approach to Weird Fantasy is not random. I have a very clear idea in my head of what Noctis Labyrinth is. The Weird comes from presentation, and the loops a group of players has to go through to unravel what's inside. (More on this later)

The dynamic I want to avoid is the player knowledge that everything is loose and figured on the go. Because, in a paradoxical way, knowing that everything is a hodgepodge of random table entries, kills the Mystery, which hinders the Weird. When you open Noctis Labyrinth, you will find answers. And those answers will be Weird.   

The Weird also comes from a complete lack of expectation about reproducibility. I don't only fully accept what your version of Noctis Labyrinth will be completely different from mine, but quite intentionally designed the game to be different from group to group.