Canons and Promises for the Lakelands

09 Nov, 2026

Between my new job and my attempt to make another Planegea product, I've been neglecting my blog. I don't mind that so much, as blogging about games is really a second-order hobby, except that it also means I'm not publishing much about my post-apocalyptic/cosmic horror setting. However, that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it. In particular, working with Planegea has given me lots of opportunity to consider the relationship between a setting's creator and the subsequent creators who then work with it: GMs and players, yes, but also publishers of third-party material. All these people have different needs and orientations with regard to such things as "the setting" and "canon," and for the sake of creators besides me who might one day work on the Lakelands, I think two things could be helpful. First, I want to define what I think of as the Lakelands canon. Second, I will make a promise to leave specific parts of the setting undefined, so that other creators can play freely in those spaces, confident that I won't later make something up about that region that contradicts their own work.

Of course, it seems a little silly to do this when, as far as I know, there isn't anyone excited to run a game in the Lakelands, and there may never be. However, I do hope that one day I can publish a book for this setting, and that there are GMs excited to run games here. This post is thus written in anticipation of them – or of you, if you're one such person reading this in the future. There's no harm in doing this work early, and there's nothing gained by doing it late. However, there may be other value for you in this post, even if you don't ever want to run a game in the Lakelands: if you like what I'm doing, you may want to try it for your own setting.

Source: Nuno Alberto, 2020 (Unsplash license)

The Canon

Before I tell you what the canon is, I should briefly discuss what a canon is.

A canon, as I best understand it from how people use the word across different domains, is a set of texts that a group agrees to take as binding in some way. The canon of scripture, for instance, are those texts that a religious group takes to be authoritative for their religion, though what exactly "authoritative" means could be a subject of some internal debate. The canon of literature are those texts that the discipline of literary criticism takes its members to be responsible for knowing something about; not every literary analyst needs to have read all of them, necessarily, but if you are one, you accept that you might eventually be called upon to do so. The canon of a fandom are those texts within a franchise that fans agree are the ones they can call upon when settling disputes or answering questions about that setting.

Of course, there's not necessarily any truth to the matter of what a given canon is. It's a question of agreement, not discovery.¹ And as you know if you've spent time in the fandom of a large enough franchise, which texts are canon for a particular discussion is not always a settled matter. An argument about some particular facet of the franchise often becomes an argument about the fandom's canon.²

For the purposes of a TTRPG setting, then, the canon is the set of texts about the setting to which we agree to bind ourselves. There's a lot more to be said on that, including the fact that any one person can be part of more than one "we": a fandom, a table, and so on. The canon of the fandom may not be the same as the canon of the table. What I'm mostly considering here, though, are the people who are contributing to the setting publicly: when I want to publish something about Planegea, it's important to me that what I write and release doesn't contradict The Star-Shaman's Song of Planegea or any of the Echoes. I want people to be able to use what I make without that kind of friction! In that sense, I'm treating the SSSP and the Echoes as canon; I'm binding myself to what they say, at least when I'm making products. What I do at the table could be a different story.

Now, as just a single person, I can't really declare a canon, not even for the setting that I myself make. That's something only communities can do. What I can do, however, is tell you what existing writing I intend to be bound by as I work away at the Lakelands and its neighbouring territories. In other words, I can tell you what I intend to treat as canon, as though I make up a community of one.

This then, is the canon for my post-apocalyptic/cosmic horror setting, as I intend it:

• any Lakelands or related setting material that I publish somewhere with a fixed price or as PWYW.

That's it. Now, you'll note that at time of writing, no such texts exist, because I haven't published anything yet. This means that the setting has no canon yet, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Here are things that are not, and will never be, part of the setting's canon, at least as far as I'm concerned:

• any posts or pages on this blog, with the possible exception of this one;³
• anything I write on reddit or Discord;
• anything I write on more traditional social media, like Bluesky or Mastodon.

As I've always said, I reserve the right to change anything I write in these posts. They're drafts. When I do publish something, though, you can count on me to stick to it.

Promises

By telling you what I intend to take as the canon, I'm making a promise about what's fixed and what isn't. I think it might help to make other promises, too, specifically about what parts of the map I plan to leave blank.

The main focus of my attention for the moment is either on the broad strokes of the Lakelands or more detailed locations near present-day Stratford, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Guelph. However, I do want, eventually, to detail more in Ottawa, the GTA, Windsor/Detroit, Algonquin Provincial Park and environs, and the area around Rochester, NY. I furthermore reserve the right to develop Goderich and the Bruce Power site further, if doing so seems useful. I will also want to explore the world outside of the Lakelands, such as British Columbia, the Canadian Prairies, and the Canadian Arctic. Finally, I would be open to collaborating with interested people on certain parts of the setting, so it's possible that I could change focus to other areas because someone I'm working with wants to explore something in that area.

For all of the following regions, however, I promise not to design any of the major political actors or establish any more settlements than I already have:

• Wisconsin, USA, except for Brown, Door, Kewaunee, and Manitowoc Counties;
• Ohio, USA, except for Ashtabula, Defiance, Fulton, and Williams Counties;
• Lambton County, Ontario, except for the fact that parts of them were especially hard-hit by the Bad Years;
• western Middlesex County, Ontario, ie. everything except Lucan Biddulph, Middlesex Centre, and Thames Centre; and
• Cochrane and Timiskaming Districts, Ontario.

Of course, lots of things are already implied about these regions from my larger-scale writing, such as in "Introducing the Lakelands: A Post-Apocalypse / Cosmic Horror Setting," "The Geography of the Lakelands and the World," "Geminites," "New Hominids," and "The Bad Years." Note too that I reserve the right to say that certain factions have a presence in those regions; in particular, certain saviour factions and traitor factions have operations all through the Lakelands and so will necessarily operate in each of the regions I list above. However, I'm not going to say anything about specific faction outposts or assets in those regions, I won't describe any settlements or dreamzones in these regions, and I won't ever declare who the major city-states or alliances are there. You can be sure I won't meaningfully tinker with the geo-politics of any of those areas. They're yours to play with now.⁴

I usually say that Lakelands posts are provisional and open to change. This one is an exception: because I'm making promises, the only substantive changes I'll ever make are to add more regions to these lists.

#for GMs #the Lakelands