Lessons in wilderness travel from TOR

Prompted by a post by Gabor Lux, I started thinking about (rpg) rules for wilderness travel. Generally, I find I like the idea of wilderness travel better than the actual thing - in all games but The One Ring. Here's what I like about traveling in The One Ring.

First of all, you don't go hex-to-hex, but plot out your journey one leg at a time: from Rhosgobel to Gladden Fields, then upriver to Old Ford, then North to Beorn. Only after having plotted out your course do you check the hexmap and DM maps to calculate distances. This places a substantial overhead on the planning of the journey where you might need to break out your calculator to multiply the hexagons with the terrain difficulty and so on. But the actual activities at the table - deciding on a destination and choosing the best way there - is very closely related to the in-game activity. Because of this, it is neither a chore, nor as abstract and repetitive as the constant choices of direction in a hexcrawl.

Second, there's (room for) emergent complexity in how the various skill tests interact with the specifics of the journey. In TOR, you roll one or more times on your Travel skill during a journey, and in addition there are group roles - like Lookout - that might require players to roll on specific skills. Any character can only hold one role in the group. Consequently, a larger group is better for handling the tasks: having three Lookouts makes you less likely to be ambushed. But at the same time, these specific rolls are often the results of Misfortunes - or catastrophic failures on other die rolls. So the larger group has better chances of handling problems, while the smaller group has better chances of never encountering problems. This is super elegant.

Third, traveling drains your resources without you counting arrows and rations. Instead, you gain fatigue which is related to HP, and gain shadow (the corruption measure) which is related to your succeed anyway-currency Hope. Neither of this affects your character negatively, but they affect the risk associated with your actions. So for example, a character with 10 Hope can turn 10 failures into successes (basically). If the character suffers 8 Shadow, she still has the same potential of turning 10 failures into successes. But once she has done so twice - making her Hope no higher than her Shadow - any catastrophic failure will result in an act of cowardice, greed or similar anti-social behavior. This concentrates book-keeping but also introduces tensions in the group simply because you can see the odds worsen. Far from superficial role-playing cues, you act on your knowledge that the tired fighter has gone from a bedrock to a liability in his current state.

Fourth, following paths you've traveled before significantly reduces travel time. Again, this is reflected both in the rules, in the planning (you know which way to go) and in the calculations (you know how many hexes the distance is). So even if you didn't find anything else, this is something that gives your exploration value.

The fatal flaw.
The main shortcoming of TOR is that there is nothing on the map except the obvious. I like the pacing, where you travel for days without seeing anyone. But there should be SOMETHING to discover other than random encounters and major settlements. For such a large map, I think there should've been at least 100 locations that were only on the GM's map for the PCs to encounter on their travels. Worse, the map contains no coordinate system so even crowdsourcing locations is difficult because there's no straightforward way for me to place an idea on anyone else's map.