Writing in Canon Settings (microblog)

Working on the Middle-earth Hexcrawl Project has made me want to articulate some brief thoughts I've had on writing material for canon settings. This is a microblog, unedited, stream of consciousness, and written while drunk.

If you just faithfully reproduce the things that Tolkien directly talked about, Middle-earth would seem very empty indeed. You can see in Idraluna Archive's map that much of the setting feels empty because nothing is as built out as the Shire.

I have three approaches to filling in the empty space. I wouldn't call them contradictory, but they are different ways to get at the same problem.

One approach is resonance. If I invent something whole cloth, it needs to feel like an appropriate inclusion. In the first edition of The One Ring, Francis Nepitello did a great job with this. The River-maidens aren't mentioned in any of the canon material, but they feel so resonant! Europe is replete, East and West, with water women that wreak havoc. And you know from Goldberry that there are personified Rivers and River's Daughters. 

The other approach is what I call the Grant Morrison method. When he wrote Batman, he said he took the entirety of the comic line as "canon," even the weird and silly periods where Batman and Robin fought aliens and stuff. One part of the exercise of populating the entirety of Middle-earth as a hex map is looking at the licensed games I own and seeing how I would organize them for this kind of blorby, procedural play. If MERP has a weird undead spirit called the Gullion in the Shire, should I contradict them? 

...To answer my own rhetorical, yes! I should! Curating the licensed material for my own finicky personal preferences is part of the fun. But as I read the works of those who have come before, I'm often struck by stuff that isn't necessarily resonant but is...real? Strange? Appealing? I borrow my favorite pieces of these and stick them into the hexcrawl (with credit). 

The third approach is the simplest: revel in the void. Certainly, there are lonesome places in our own world. Not every hex needs to be a slam dunk. Sometimes, a lonely lake or ancient monument is enough to give some color. The writing exercise for the day can be easy. And when I have an opportunity, I can hide cool things in random encounters that will make those hexes feel fun when explored.

As an additional caveat, all of this is just for my own amusement. I've always been writing Tolkien RPG stuff, since my very earliest days playing RPGs, and I suspect I always will. This is a project only as long as it's interesting to me as a daily writing exercise. But while I'm doing it, I might as well be reflective about what choices I'm making today and why.