Staffing Advice on using non-canonical lore

[Icewolf 258]

There are some gaps in the lore of Middle-earth, namely regarding the 7 clans of dwarves. My problem is that we only really have trusted information about three of them (four, if you count the Petty-Dwarves) as they are the only ones which Tolkien actually wrote something about. The most well documented are the Longbeards (the clan that Thorin and his family belong to), the Firebeards (a clan which caused a lot of trouble for elves in the First Age) and the Broadbeams, a clan which lives near the Firebeards (as I understand it, there are somethings that aren't clear about them because some of the lore only exists in the History of Middle-Earth books and wasn't used in the Silmarillion , but I still use it as a guide.) The Petty-Dwarves are a group of dwarves which were exiled from their clans and are possibly a mixture of all - they aren't as sophisticated as the ones which stayed with their clans.

 

My problem arises because other than the names of the other clans, (and the possible locations of where they lived), Tolkien never revealed any information about them. When companies in the past have created role-playing games, they have made up their own lore regarding it. This in itself wouldn't be a problem because I don't mind filling in gaps - the problem is that those games are old, the companies either don't exist any more, or if they do, they don't produce the games. The most recent official role-playing game is The One Ring, and I'm not sure if they've expanded their information on dwarves yet. I have found a wiki made by fans which document the information found in the discontinued games, but I don't know how accurate it is. The way they've written it is a bit of a mess (and not of the same quality as the information found on Tolkien Gateway - as it's non-canonical, the people who contribute to it have not really added any information other than referencing in the books and the names that Tolkien gave the clans.) Although I've tried tracking down the guides and found them, they are hideously expensive because they've been discontinued.

 

I was wondering what you do this situation. Is it acceptable to write the lore yourself even if it's non-canonical? How have other fandom rpers handled creating their own lore to fill in gaps?

Edited January 27, 2018 by Icewolf

[Kit the Human 758]

It's absolutely acceptable. I'm sure that you want to give people a variety of different clans to explore, to do so you need to establish who they are and how they operate. You could run into discrepancies otherwise. 

 

For any gaps or inconsistencies, I simply state that this is board canon. If you want to, you could explain why you needed to add non-canonical information. Personally I don't give a rat's because I accept that the original material is being adapted. But I'm not a purist, so long as the admin makes it clear that there's been some expansion or diversion, I'm happy to play along. 

[Sparky Muse 16]

I think a lot of people do that by labeling the board as "AU, or "Alternate Universe". I've seen it done on several Harry Potter or anime-based sites.

[Raven 18]

I LOVE it when sites make their own lore (as long as it doesn't outright contradict very well-known canon lore). It creates a deeper and more involved community. On TNI we even have a Library forum where people can post book summaries of IC books ^^

[Death Kitten 200]

I deal a lot with various "qualities" of canon with Star Trek. There's basically two tiers of canon in Trek—Hard canon: TV and movies, and soft canon: books and other licensed properties. Soft canon is considered soft because it's normal for the hard canon to contradict the soft canon when production teams change for later hard canon works. As a result of this, as well as normal fandom disagreements with the choices of production teams on hard canon, each Trek fan inevitably ends up with a unique head canon: usually a mix of their favorite hard canon sources, then beloved soft canon materials, and their collection of ideas and theories that fill in the gaps (often collected from a number of sources as well as dreamed up by themselves).

 

This makes compiling lore for a Trek game kinda problematic.

 

As Kit suggests, just clearly mark what's game specific lore for your game, and if you feel inclined, provide explanation on why you chose to do it the way you did.

 

The biggest challenge will be the lore buffs, who come in and choose not to read any of your provided lore, assuming they already know everything. I deal with this in Trek all the time: people join up, don't even skim the wiki I compiled, then get all butthurt when I point out how they're contradicting game canon, especially if something you've included in the game lore contradicts the popular fanon. You have to be prepared to stand firm, and make judgement calls on what will and won't break the spirit of what you're trying for in the game.

[Guest Archaic Cyborg]

That’s normal; I don’t think it’s possible to open and run a game that is 100% canon-accurate, because that would mean the characters never say or do anything that -hasn’t- happened in the show/book/movie/whatever. 

 

All you need to do is tack on an AU tag somewhere and have a small foreword that fanon has been incorporated wherever needed, to fill in absent lore.

[Quell 249]

I'm going to start by saying I've never run a fandom-based forum that had this issue -- BUT.

 

When I do 1x1 RPs, I often fill in lore to make an RP flow properly and get extra stuff to sink my teeth and mind into. My feeling is, the canon is canon -- don't change it. But anything that has not been established is fair game!

 

If it makes you feel uncomfortable to say "canon" while adding in extra lore, I've seen some sites say "semi-canon" or "canon AU" to explain that they are basically canon-based, but just have some minor tweaks. ^^

 

But yeah, I don't think it'd be an issue at all!

[Icewolf 258]

The board is going to be AU anyway, because I started writing a canon character who gets killed in the official version, but survives in mine. I didn't intend to start writing him, but circumstances meant that I did, eventually, and I found that I liked writing him. There isn't a board around where I could do play him in the main area of the site because it follows canon too closely. Playing him that way just seemed too limiting and didn't appeal to me. And, I got quite tired of panfandom/original sand box sites being devoid of Tolkien writers and the problems with twitter, both technical and ones people make themselves, so it seemed making a board was the best solution.

 

Thanks for the imput and it has been encouraging. I did track down an expansion book for the One Ring which focuses on dwarves, but it doesn't look like they're going to use the same clan system that the old rpgs did, so I think I'll have to come up with my own lore for them. I'll try to keep it close to the canon as I can, though. It's mainly so that everyone is basing their characters on the same history.