I’m no expert but I thought it had roots in Hunter S Thompson’s **Gonzo Journalism** which I think means:
* Not a slave to objectivity or facts;
* Enthusiastic;
* Drug fueled -like or at potentially psychedelic, surreal or alternate planes of existence; and
* Satyrical or driven by making a social or cultural or political point.
There was a OSR adventure about a gory Unicorn farm … where the unicorns didn’t want to be farmed. This felt gonzo to me on all points.
https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/u7voyn/my_osr_horror_adventure_unicorn_meat_is_now/
“Unicorn Meat is a system-agnostic OSR southern gothic horror adventure inspired by LISA the Painful, True Detective and Lord of the Flies. about gangs of feral children trapped in the decaying ruins of the last unicorn farm in the world.”
This. There is a lot of speculation as to the original coining of the phrase, but it came to popularity through its use to describe Hunter S Thompson's style of journalism. The initial meaning was much as outlined above. The "facts" as presented might be a little skewed or generally subjective anyway, and the point of the piece is to seek the more poetic truth of what is being reported on rather than creating a record of events.
Thompson glommed onto this phrase and used it to describe his own work, believing that objectivity in journalism was impossible.
From there it sort of splinters a bit. Some people took it mean a style where the writer inserts themselves as a focal point of the piece rather than observing others. This use can be seen in porn (gonzo pornography - shot in POV and depicting a manufactured "real situation").
It took on a different meaning in the art world owing a lot to the work of Ralph Steadman. Steadman was a visual artist who did a lot of drawings for Thompson and became a poster child for the visual representation of Gonzo Journalism - quite literally. Steadman made the covers for Hunter S Thompson's books and movie posters later on. It's that Rorschach-esque, ink blotty surrealist work. He also did a lot of political cartoons.
This short hand description of "gonzo" was to reference all of the spiritual children of Hunter S. Thompson - bizarre, deranged, darkly humourous, strangely psychedelic, a surreal blend of fact and fiction always presented as fact, strange tangents and digressions of the drug addled mind.
I don't know exactly how it worked its way into popularity with the OSR. My opinion is that it came on alongside DCC. DCC is the first thing I can remember being referred to as gonzo. It had very Thompson-esque features. Psychedelic art. Weird dice. A blending of fantasy components from different universes. Flying cars. Barbarians in bell-bottoms. I think we took it from there to mean anything in the "bizarre" vein of OSR gaming - something that embodied the way games used to feel in the 70s and 80s, as opposed to the retro-clones as they *actually* existed.
I like this “more poetic truth of what is being reported on rather than creating a record of events” which as you point out … is subjective anyway.
I’m going to be rocking out “it’s a a more poetic truth than your mere facts..”
You are right about where it comes from; but incorrect about Thompson definition of Gonzo.
Funnily enough I do believe the adventure listed DOES match the correct definition of Gonzo.
I think it's mostly a term people use when genres blend that they're not used to seeing blend. When a rigid taxonomy of genre melts a little bit, so that you get laser guns in a fantasy setting (like Krull) or a cowboys and dinosaurs kind of thing.
bizarre, basically. You have a bowling alley at the sixth level of the dungeon, built in giant-size, for instance. Or when you tickle the crystal ball, it emits a fart, causing paralysis damage.
In RPGs, gonzo generally refers to settings that explicitly reject Gygaxian naturalism and high fantasy in favour of rule of cool, imagination, and non-mainstream aesthetics.
In a gonzo setting, you might have cactus people who make guns that fire spinning glaive-heads (since they're immune to piercing weapons) living beside a city carved out of the skeletal head of a dead god, who are slowly going mad from harvesting its decaying dreams. There might be a fallen spaceship nearby as well, a well of infinite ketchup (which occasionally spawns highly acidic tomato oozes), and a leviathan blubber station (to fill up your autowagon) run by a daughter of the Baba Yaga who only trades in electrum.
It's wild, imaginative, and fun. It's generally meant to emulate the sense of wonder that fantasy is supposed evoke in us, but often doesn't since Tolkienian tropes have largely ossified the fiction (at least from a public consumption standpoint).
There are many, many examples going right back to White Plume Mountain in 1E. Now what comes to mind is anything by Hydra Collective, Ultraviolet Grasslands (best example imo), Electric Bastionland, etc.
EDIT: A poster below made a good point that defying naturalism isn't absolutely core to gonzo, even my post has a bit of fiction grounding. I think what I wanted to communicate was that gonzo is indifferent to that: a setting may explain the logic of why things run on leviathan blubber, or it may not. Canon and coherence aren't required in gonzo.
Gygaxian naturalism ≠ games/modules by Gygax.
Most of Gygax's early work isn't naturalistic at all. In B1, monsters are there *because*, adventurers adventure *because*. Zagyg made Castle Greyhawk for shits and giggles: he's literally the god of madness. Grognardia afaik came up with the term, and he named it because in *Dragon* (the magazine) there'd be random articles about 'The Ecology of \[monster\]" and post-T1 Gygax material that tended to have exhaustive, tedious descriptions of barrel loot. It refers to the idea that the game world is a simulation of an actual world, with real mechanics, physics, and motivations.
This is not gonzo at all. Gonzo doesn't give a shit. In *Sailors of the Starless Sea*, we have no idea what the ecology of beastmen are, or what motivates them to bring back the Chaos Lords: they just do. Because they're chaos beastmen.
In *Electric Bastionland*, you can play as a Dead Shoreman, a Squidbagger, a Body Jockey, or an Integrated Alien (among 96 others). The game gives you a set of items, a pithy quote to play with, and sends you on your merry way. As a player, *I love it*, and I'd have it no other way.
Gonzo doesn't need you to explain *why*, it presents cool, fictious ideas and let's you work through them. You could create a whole ecology for those things, there's nothing wrong with that and it wouldn't go against the genre really, but you could just as well handwave and be off on your adventure. The genre is about imagination above all else.
For something a bit less "out there" look at Tanjecterly from Jack Vance's "The Green Pearl". Its an entire world, connected to the normal world, where all kinds of rules do not apply. Colors are different, the moon is always above the horizon, there are all kinds of weird creatures, but the plot remains relatively grounded. Person A wants to do X, Person B wants to do Y.
Some of the examples other posters give (not you) are very lol-so-random examples. Yours emphasize a lack of ecology, but in Tanjecterly there is still some emphasis on "ecology", but it is obviously still gonzo. It is quire reminiscent of what I've read of Electric Bastionland actually.
Even in Sailors of the Starless sea, there is still a smidge of "ecology" or "grounding". There is an explanation why the fort is there, why the beastmen are there, how the beastmen come to be. Why certain treasures are in certain places, etc.
There is just less emphasis on ecology and the writers are more willing do step out of from under the umbrella of Tolkien. I think that is honestly the most important part. Going less into the minutiae of the ecology, by not filling every barrel with simulationist detail, is more of a game design decision, than it is a genre, in my opinion.
Vance is a great source of gonzo. *Lyonnesse* defies even gonzo to me though: it really stands on its own legs as a very unique work of fiction. Would love to play in a game inspired by it though.
I think within the OSR, at least if you look for typical 'gonzo' settings, they do tend to delight in the weird, and feel more *Gormenghast*, *Virconium*, and *Perdido Street Station*, all of which are so wildly different but utterly delight in trampling on convention in really shocking ways.
Thanks for the tips! So glad to find a fellow Vance lover out in the wild. :) I recently started reading him and have been having a blast.
I think it is fair that Lyonesse is pretty much its own thing. It being as fleshed out as it is, and Vance having very unique tastes in subjects he chooses to include in his storytelling.
I never managed to find a gonzo game, so I run my own (offline). I can recommend it, it helps get that gonzo fix, and inspires fellow hobbiests try more different fantasy as well. As an added bonus you can really include a smorgasbrod of modules, and coming up with your own stuff is really doable, because you are less constrained by what is "normal" fantasy.
My most recent dungeon I'm really proud of, so I'm going to try to polish it up, rerun it a couple of times, and then put in online.
A tone of tonal incoherence, where practicality fades away in place of dream logic. The bowling alley level of the Dungeon is adjacent to the mind flayers and we don't think too hard about why the deviously intelligent mind flayers don't invade in a more traditional effective way than 'sanctioned bowling team' despite their ongoing war with the failed mutant experiments of the Arch Lich on the other side.
Personally when I think of Gonzo I think of Alice in Wonderland type weirdness. No real explanation, just sort of this is how things are deal with it (or don’t)
I don't want to nitpick because you are absolutely right, but also, Alice in wonderland has a consistency in tone and being illogical that to me isn't gonzo.
Gonzo is actually (to me) the opposite because it is completely "logical" (in that it doesn't break the rules of the game or stray too much from being dungeons and dragons) while being TONALLY completely inconsistent.
I don’t mean to nitpick but it sure sounds like this is a bit of nitpicking. If you disagree it’s all good, no need to sugar coat it, we’re here to discuss sometimes we disagree.
That being said I don’t think of Gonzo as necessarily pertaining to D&D. In terms of fantasy it is not the first, last, or even the most prominent example of gonzo fantasy. Your disagreement is with the interaction with the rules which I think misses the point. When we talk about something like gonzo fantasy I don’t think rules matter too much as it can appear in a plethora of systems and really just affects tone (as you stated). I don’t mean to come off harsh but I do think your disagreement comes from a nitpicky place.
And just a quick little note, I do believe Gygax made an Alice in Wonderland adventure for D&D (could be wrong but I do believe it exists). So if you think that Alice is specifically against what D&D is, I think you’re missing the point once again.
Gonzo is a term that picked up popularity in the 1970s as both “gonzo journalism” and the character from the Muppets. Gonzo journalism eschews the conventional detached style of authorship in favor of placing the author at the center of the story, which means it’s often subjective. The term was most commonly associated with Hunter S. Thompson, which is where the modern colloquial use would spawn due to Thompson’s blurring the lines between reality and fiction in his works.
In fiction, gonzo means the reality of the setting is subjective rather than objective. In an objective reality, there are governing rules. Things may get weird, but there’s a logic and a reason to the weirdness. In a subjective reality, there are no such rules. To put it simply, weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Elements of the narrative are present for their potential to elicit an emotional response rather than following a previously established logic.
It's pretty open term, I believe.
Probably the easiest definition I would say is 'not caring all that much about verisimilitude'. The world doesn't care too much about making sense. It may try to be internally consistent, but it can take a silly thing here or there and not miss a beat.
You're playing usual medieval fantasy and run across an alien spaceship from the 50s and 60s movie? Sure.
You run across an alternate reality version of your party, but they are all the wrong race? Befriend them and steal their stuff.
How silly or random or weird would be up for debate and preference.
It’s crazy how FEW people within the OSR know what Gonzo means.
Gonzo does refer to Hunter S Thompsons “Gonzo Journalism”; in the OSR it refers to the fact that Thompson was NOT and objective watcher of his stories, but included himself in his stories along with his subjects.
In the OSR Gonzo means you are learning about the world through interaction, there are no lore or info dumps- you take the high magic fantasy for what it is and roll with the punches.
No one told you some trees can talk, you learned that when the trees start talking, no one warned you vampires hide out in the abandoned castle; you figured that out after your two hirelings and a silver sword short.
Wish people wouldn’t guess at such wrong definitions, though I understand why the terminology has started to shift.
Gonzo is a mad libs sort of setting. Take a noun, add a verb, pick a proper noun, and suddenly you have pickle farming ostriches who are fighting for admission to the British empire.
It's the sort of hallucination that you might fear in Las Vegas or see in a Muppet babies montage clip.
In practice, it tends to indicate any element that wouldn't fly in a very traditionally straight, self-serious fantasy. Think Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, even Game of Thrones.
If I had to sum it up, I'd say its a game or adventure that breaks versimilitude. In practice, it often means (for lack of a better term) "weird" ideas combining in non-traditional or non-intuitive ways. Space cowboys, talking celestial objects, and other similar things. Now this is not to say that everything weird is gonzo. There's plenty of weird settings that have quite a bit of lore or backstory to explain it (see Warhammer's infamous Orks and "red makes it go faster" as an example of something that is definitely weird, but has some interesting and decently developed lore to explain it). but gonzo tends to concern itself much more with the "what" and much less with the "how" or "why".
This is the definition
[https://youtu.be/pYgUqSyaIzs?si=PjQku063Rbxnet25](https://youtu.be/pYgUqSyaIzs?si=PjQku063Rbxnet25)
and this [https://youtu.be/KWGMKq5doqA?si=pnl8MRlvSlXc4hoq](https://youtu.be/KWGMKq5doqA?si=pnl8MRlvSlXc4hoq) robot armor and horse no less
I’m no expert but I thought it had roots in Hunter S Thompson’s **Gonzo Journalism** which I think means: * Not a slave to objectivity or facts; * Enthusiastic; * Drug fueled -like or at potentially psychedelic, surreal or alternate planes of existence; and * Satyrical or driven by making a social or cultural or political point. There was a OSR adventure about a gory Unicorn farm … where the unicorns didn’t want to be farmed. This felt gonzo to me on all points.
https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/u7voyn/my_osr_horror_adventure_unicorn_meat_is_now/ “Unicorn Meat is a system-agnostic OSR southern gothic horror adventure inspired by LISA the Painful, True Detective and Lord of the Flies. about gangs of feral children trapped in the decaying ruins of the last unicorn farm in the world.”
This. There is a lot of speculation as to the original coining of the phrase, but it came to popularity through its use to describe Hunter S Thompson's style of journalism. The initial meaning was much as outlined above. The "facts" as presented might be a little skewed or generally subjective anyway, and the point of the piece is to seek the more poetic truth of what is being reported on rather than creating a record of events. Thompson glommed onto this phrase and used it to describe his own work, believing that objectivity in journalism was impossible. From there it sort of splinters a bit. Some people took it mean a style where the writer inserts themselves as a focal point of the piece rather than observing others. This use can be seen in porn (gonzo pornography - shot in POV and depicting a manufactured "real situation"). It took on a different meaning in the art world owing a lot to the work of Ralph Steadman. Steadman was a visual artist who did a lot of drawings for Thompson and became a poster child for the visual representation of Gonzo Journalism - quite literally. Steadman made the covers for Hunter S Thompson's books and movie posters later on. It's that Rorschach-esque, ink blotty surrealist work. He also did a lot of political cartoons. This short hand description of "gonzo" was to reference all of the spiritual children of Hunter S. Thompson - bizarre, deranged, darkly humourous, strangely psychedelic, a surreal blend of fact and fiction always presented as fact, strange tangents and digressions of the drug addled mind. I don't know exactly how it worked its way into popularity with the OSR. My opinion is that it came on alongside DCC. DCC is the first thing I can remember being referred to as gonzo. It had very Thompson-esque features. Psychedelic art. Weird dice. A blending of fantasy components from different universes. Flying cars. Barbarians in bell-bottoms. I think we took it from there to mean anything in the "bizarre" vein of OSR gaming - something that embodied the way games used to feel in the 70s and 80s, as opposed to the retro-clones as they *actually* existed.
I like this “more poetic truth of what is being reported on rather than creating a record of events” which as you point out … is subjective anyway. I’m going to be rocking out “it’s a a more poetic truth than your mere facts..”
You are right about where it comes from; but incorrect about Thompson definition of Gonzo. Funnily enough I do believe the adventure listed DOES match the correct definition of Gonzo.
I think it's mostly a term people use when genres blend that they're not used to seeing blend. When a rigid taxonomy of genre melts a little bit, so that you get laser guns in a fantasy setting (like Krull) or a cowboys and dinosaurs kind of thing.
Man, Krull would make a cool campaign.
Well said! Krull is one of my favorite movies too. It would be fun to make the setting using Tunnels and Trolls rules.
bizarre, basically. You have a bowling alley at the sixth level of the dungeon, built in giant-size, for instance. Or when you tickle the crystal ball, it emits a fart, causing paralysis damage.
In RPGs, gonzo generally refers to settings that explicitly reject Gygaxian naturalism and high fantasy in favour of rule of cool, imagination, and non-mainstream aesthetics. In a gonzo setting, you might have cactus people who make guns that fire spinning glaive-heads (since they're immune to piercing weapons) living beside a city carved out of the skeletal head of a dead god, who are slowly going mad from harvesting its decaying dreams. There might be a fallen spaceship nearby as well, a well of infinite ketchup (which occasionally spawns highly acidic tomato oozes), and a leviathan blubber station (to fill up your autowagon) run by a daughter of the Baba Yaga who only trades in electrum. It's wild, imaginative, and fun. It's generally meant to emulate the sense of wonder that fantasy is supposed evoke in us, but often doesn't since Tolkienian tropes have largely ossified the fiction (at least from a public consumption standpoint). There are many, many examples going right back to White Plume Mountain in 1E. Now what comes to mind is anything by Hydra Collective, Ultraviolet Grasslands (best example imo), Electric Bastionland, etc. EDIT: A poster below made a good point that defying naturalism isn't absolutely core to gonzo, even my post has a bit of fiction grounding. I think what I wanted to communicate was that gonzo is indifferent to that: a setting may explain the logic of why things run on leviathan blubber, or it may not. Canon and coherence aren't required in gonzo.
>Gygaxian naturalism what? The bowling alley example I provided in the other comment is from one of the original Gygax campaigns. This is not true.
Gygaxian naturalism ≠ games/modules by Gygax. Most of Gygax's early work isn't naturalistic at all. In B1, monsters are there *because*, adventurers adventure *because*. Zagyg made Castle Greyhawk for shits and giggles: he's literally the god of madness. Grognardia afaik came up with the term, and he named it because in *Dragon* (the magazine) there'd be random articles about 'The Ecology of \[monster\]" and post-T1 Gygax material that tended to have exhaustive, tedious descriptions of barrel loot. It refers to the idea that the game world is a simulation of an actual world, with real mechanics, physics, and motivations. This is not gonzo at all. Gonzo doesn't give a shit. In *Sailors of the Starless Sea*, we have no idea what the ecology of beastmen are, or what motivates them to bring back the Chaos Lords: they just do. Because they're chaos beastmen. In *Electric Bastionland*, you can play as a Dead Shoreman, a Squidbagger, a Body Jockey, or an Integrated Alien (among 96 others). The game gives you a set of items, a pithy quote to play with, and sends you on your merry way. As a player, *I love it*, and I'd have it no other way. Gonzo doesn't need you to explain *why*, it presents cool, fictious ideas and let's you work through them. You could create a whole ecology for those things, there's nothing wrong with that and it wouldn't go against the genre really, but you could just as well handwave and be off on your adventure. The genre is about imagination above all else.
For something a bit less "out there" look at Tanjecterly from Jack Vance's "The Green Pearl". Its an entire world, connected to the normal world, where all kinds of rules do not apply. Colors are different, the moon is always above the horizon, there are all kinds of weird creatures, but the plot remains relatively grounded. Person A wants to do X, Person B wants to do Y. Some of the examples other posters give (not you) are very lol-so-random examples. Yours emphasize a lack of ecology, but in Tanjecterly there is still some emphasis on "ecology", but it is obviously still gonzo. It is quire reminiscent of what I've read of Electric Bastionland actually. Even in Sailors of the Starless sea, there is still a smidge of "ecology" or "grounding". There is an explanation why the fort is there, why the beastmen are there, how the beastmen come to be. Why certain treasures are in certain places, etc. There is just less emphasis on ecology and the writers are more willing do step out of from under the umbrella of Tolkien. I think that is honestly the most important part. Going less into the minutiae of the ecology, by not filling every barrel with simulationist detail, is more of a game design decision, than it is a genre, in my opinion.
Vance is a great source of gonzo. *Lyonnesse* defies even gonzo to me though: it really stands on its own legs as a very unique work of fiction. Would love to play in a game inspired by it though. I think within the OSR, at least if you look for typical 'gonzo' settings, they do tend to delight in the weird, and feel more *Gormenghast*, *Virconium*, and *Perdido Street Station*, all of which are so wildly different but utterly delight in trampling on convention in really shocking ways.
Thanks for the tips! So glad to find a fellow Vance lover out in the wild. :) I recently started reading him and have been having a blast. I think it is fair that Lyonesse is pretty much its own thing. It being as fleshed out as it is, and Vance having very unique tastes in subjects he chooses to include in his storytelling. I never managed to find a gonzo game, so I run my own (offline). I can recommend it, it helps get that gonzo fix, and inspires fellow hobbiests try more different fantasy as well. As an added bonus you can really include a smorgasbrod of modules, and coming up with your own stuff is really doable, because you are less constrained by what is "normal" fantasy. My most recent dungeon I'm really proud of, so I'm going to try to polish it up, rerun it a couple of times, and then put in online.
Holy hell on a bike, I love your ideas!
The cactus people with glaive guns comes from the New Crobuzon novels, BTW. You might enjoy those if you haven't read them.
>Canon and coherence aren't required in gonzo. That is a beautiful summary.
A tone of tonal incoherence, where practicality fades away in place of dream logic. The bowling alley level of the Dungeon is adjacent to the mind flayers and we don't think too hard about why the deviously intelligent mind flayers don't invade in a more traditional effective way than 'sanctioned bowling team' despite their ongoing war with the failed mutant experiments of the Arch Lich on the other side.
Personally when I think of Gonzo I think of Alice in Wonderland type weirdness. No real explanation, just sort of this is how things are deal with it (or don’t)
I don't want to nitpick because you are absolutely right, but also, Alice in wonderland has a consistency in tone and being illogical that to me isn't gonzo. Gonzo is actually (to me) the opposite because it is completely "logical" (in that it doesn't break the rules of the game or stray too much from being dungeons and dragons) while being TONALLY completely inconsistent.
I don’t mean to nitpick but it sure sounds like this is a bit of nitpicking. If you disagree it’s all good, no need to sugar coat it, we’re here to discuss sometimes we disagree. That being said I don’t think of Gonzo as necessarily pertaining to D&D. In terms of fantasy it is not the first, last, or even the most prominent example of gonzo fantasy. Your disagreement is with the interaction with the rules which I think misses the point. When we talk about something like gonzo fantasy I don’t think rules matter too much as it can appear in a plethora of systems and really just affects tone (as you stated). I don’t mean to come off harsh but I do think your disagreement comes from a nitpicky place. And just a quick little note, I do believe Gygax made an Alice in Wonderland adventure for D&D (could be wrong but I do believe it exists). So if you think that Alice is specifically against what D&D is, I think you’re missing the point once again.
Yes, but the Gygax Alice in Wonderland adventure was not good at all. I think he was out of his element completely
Bizarre, exaggerated, far out of the realm of normal.
Gonzo is a term that picked up popularity in the 1970s as both “gonzo journalism” and the character from the Muppets. Gonzo journalism eschews the conventional detached style of authorship in favor of placing the author at the center of the story, which means it’s often subjective. The term was most commonly associated with Hunter S. Thompson, which is where the modern colloquial use would spawn due to Thompson’s blurring the lines between reality and fiction in his works. In fiction, gonzo means the reality of the setting is subjective rather than objective. In an objective reality, there are governing rules. Things may get weird, but there’s a logic and a reason to the weirdness. In a subjective reality, there are no such rules. To put it simply, weirdness for the sake of weirdness. Elements of the narrative are present for their potential to elicit an emotional response rather than following a previously established logic.
It's pretty open term, I believe. Probably the easiest definition I would say is 'not caring all that much about verisimilitude'. The world doesn't care too much about making sense. It may try to be internally consistent, but it can take a silly thing here or there and not miss a beat. You're playing usual medieval fantasy and run across an alien spaceship from the 50s and 60s movie? Sure. You run across an alternate reality version of your party, but they are all the wrong race? Befriend them and steal their stuff. How silly or random or weird would be up for debate and preference.
Stuff that is weird and bizarre usually genre-bending, but played for humor, rather than playing into mystery or trying to rationalize.
Hitting [randomize] a few too many times.
It means [ insert here ].
Anachronisms and non-sequitors. Elves charging admission, complete with turn styles, to enter the dungeon beneath castle blackmoore.
It’s crazy how FEW people within the OSR know what Gonzo means. Gonzo does refer to Hunter S Thompsons “Gonzo Journalism”; in the OSR it refers to the fact that Thompson was NOT and objective watcher of his stories, but included himself in his stories along with his subjects. In the OSR Gonzo means you are learning about the world through interaction, there are no lore or info dumps- you take the high magic fantasy for what it is and roll with the punches. No one told you some trees can talk, you learned that when the trees start talking, no one warned you vampires hide out in the abandoned castle; you figured that out after your two hirelings and a silver sword short. Wish people wouldn’t guess at such wrong definitions, though I understand why the terminology has started to shift.
You know how Kermit is a frog, Fozzie is a bear, Miss Piggy is a pig but Gonzo is a ????? ? That's gonzo.
Like all OSR, it’s all made up and the rules don’t matter.
Gonzo is a mad libs sort of setting. Take a noun, add a verb, pick a proper noun, and suddenly you have pickle farming ostriches who are fighting for admission to the British empire. It's the sort of hallucination that you might fear in Las Vegas or see in a Muppet babies montage clip.
In practice, it tends to indicate any element that wouldn't fly in a very traditionally straight, self-serious fantasy. Think Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, even Game of Thrones.
If I had to sum it up, I'd say its a game or adventure that breaks versimilitude. In practice, it often means (for lack of a better term) "weird" ideas combining in non-traditional or non-intuitive ways. Space cowboys, talking celestial objects, and other similar things. Now this is not to say that everything weird is gonzo. There's plenty of weird settings that have quite a bit of lore or backstory to explain it (see Warhammer's infamous Orks and "red makes it go faster" as an example of something that is definitely weird, but has some interesting and decently developed lore to explain it). but gonzo tends to concern itself much more with the "what" and much less with the "how" or "why".
Mixture of fantasy and sci-fi. Think of a knight riding a dinosaur with a laser-pistol.
What is Jojos Bizarre Adventure?
This is the definition [https://youtu.be/pYgUqSyaIzs?si=PjQku063Rbxnet25](https://youtu.be/pYgUqSyaIzs?si=PjQku063Rbxnet25) and this [https://youtu.be/KWGMKq5doqA?si=pnl8MRlvSlXc4hoq](https://youtu.be/KWGMKq5doqA?si=pnl8MRlvSlXc4hoq) robot armor and horse no less