User blog:LOTRMod/On Canon

I am quite pleased with how the new update has turned out, especially the Moredain, which I think work even better as a faction than I first imagined. However, something about this new faction makes me feel a little uneasy.

Back when I first started this mod I decided it was going to stay firmly in line with Tolkien's canon. Yes, there would be things added that weren't mentioned in LOTR, like saltpetre, or lions, or hobbit orcharders, or mirk-oak trees, or pear cider, but none of this stuff actually conflicts with the canon, and almost all of it actually makes a lot of sense and fits in well to make the game world seem more in-depth. And yes, there are elements of the mod that draw visual inspiration from the movies, but I tried to make sure these inspirations don't contradict the canon (although there are many things which don't and won't be based on the movies, for example the wood-elf armour, Lothlórien biome, Wargs, and Minas Tirith when it is finally added will look quite different - it will have a black wall and be surrounded by gardens, as the books describe).

Even the lesser-described factions like the Blue Mountains Dwarves and Near Harad are still taken from canon, and are based on what is described there. But with the Moredain I feel we have crossed a line. There is very, very little said about Far Haradrim in the canon:

"...and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues..."

This passage of course became the Half-trolls in the mod. So even the obscure Half-trolls faction does in fact have a basis in canon.

But 'Moredain' doesn't come from the canon anywhere. I constructed it using a Sindarin dictionary, and later discovered it existing somewhere else independently as the name of a jungle on a role-playing map. Their banner, culture, architecture, history, and everything else is entirely constructed and non-canon.

We had a decision to make with this mod regarding the unknown lands of Rhun and Harad - do we leave them out, or attempt to fill them with new inventions not taken from the canon? Obviously, we chose the latter. But, as I now realise, this choice conflicts with one of the mod's founding principles, the adherence to canon, that has been a very important principle throughout the mod's development, yet has now quietly passed into ruin without me even noticing.

Perhaps the Moredain are not too bad, because, after all, there were Far Haradrim at the battle of Pelennor, and they were allied with Mordor. But then we also have the Tauredain to come - good Far Haradrim? (Of course it makes sense that an entire continent of Men would not be all evil, but it wasn't mentioned in canon.) A jungle empire which wasn't even hinted at in canon? And some of our plans for Rhun are even more outlandish.

So that is why I feel uneasy, because we have now crossed a line and cannot go back - indeed, as you will see in the coming months, only further across it. I would like to tell myself there is a difference between contradicting canon and expanding outside it, but I am not so sure this is true.