Exploring and immersing oneself in the canon of a world can be, simply put, a lot of fun. There’s a certain joy of discovery that I imagine is similar to what a medieval archaeologist’s joy in finding reading the marginalia and lacunae of chronicles and annals. A well-realized world teases the existence of a structured reality every bit as fractal and detailed as our own. Omissions are merely invitations for us to imagine more and to drawn further in this wilful illusion. But for this illusion to be sustained, there must be specificity and substance. It’s easy to obsess over these things. You know which kind of obsession I’m talking about. It’s the obsession that motivates many a heated debate about whether Balrogs have wings or not, how Khan could have recognized Chekov in Star Trek II, and what exactly making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs means. It is one of the bugle horns of nerddom (and I wouldn’t have it any other way!).

The heavy-hitters of published settings (be they made-for-tabletop-games or adapted from a source) thus tend to be heavy on specific information. There are this many miles between that and that city, the monarch is named x and has ruled for y years, here is a list of important organizations and their members, and so on and so forth. Such works prioritize specific, concrete, and clear information about the world. In the case of licensed settings, recognizable-from-the-book-or-the-movie elements tend to form a nucleus to structure additional information around.

The accidental consequence of this is that enjoying the setting can become a function of mastering the setting. And that mastery can be hugely rewarding – there’s a reason the Forgotten Realms have produced setting description books to an amount that puts a modestly-sized college library to shame. Eberron had, in its relatively short 3.5e life cycle, more than a dozen(!) books with additional setting material released. Not to mention the conworld leviathans of Tekúmel, Glorantha and Hârn.

Playing an RPG, particularly in capacity where you’re expected to worldbuilding or world-management, is a creative act. In my adolescence, I tended to be very uncomfortable playing in anything but a homebrew world. After all, here was these vast amounts of canon that I might, in my reckless youth, recklessly violate and defile. How could I in good conscience set a game in Cormyr when I did not have the sourcebook read through? Whatever additions I could make ultimately felt like intrusions upon the original work rather than as meaningful expansions. Cowed by the Dragon of Canon, I tended to enjoy published settings from a respectful distance, at least in regards to my roleplaying.

Enter the ‘toolbox setting’. Works like Stars Without Number by Kevin Crawford, Yoon-Suin by David McGrogan, and the superlative Rakehell by Brian Yaksha. If ever there was a sword to slay the Dragon of Canon, it would be forged in the furnace of these books. In essence, the toolbox setting is to worldbuilding what random encounter table is to adventure design: collections of tonally consistent and thematically connected mosaic pieces that, when combined and modulated by the reader’s creativity, create gameable results with emergent properties. All of them espouse the principles that a) there is no ‘official’ canon version of these worlds; b) do whatever the heck you want with the material here. Their genius resides not in the fact that they present a lot of tables, but that the contents of these tables all support very strong and very evocative creative visions with well-conceived tone, aesthetics, and atmosphere.

Reading and using the tools in these publications is not a passive experience, but that’s partially why I find them so congenial to OSR-style play. In richly-detailed, canon-conscious setting, there’s a sense that everything has been charted before. Someone went out there and experienced it, and the setting guide is a second-hand experience. You can know what is behind that mountain in the distance, either from being the GM and having read the campaign setting guide, or by being a player immersed in the canon of the world. Such assurance of a knowable and ordered reality seems to me at odds with the joy of fresh discovery and (dare I say it?) sense of perilous adventure. With an emergent setting, and particularly one support by a strong implicit voice and vision permeating the tables and generators, it feels truly like venturing into the unknown. And I think that’s a neat thing for the GM to share in on as well.