Single culture groups

[Ironbite]

I'm about to start up running a campaign for the first time as we have finally finished 'Edge of the Empire' for now, been looking forward to this all year.

However, my players all want to play elves. I was hoping for a bit more diversity and have asked them to at least read up on the other cultures and think about it, but don't want to steam role them.

Has anyone else run a single race campaign? I'm just thinking ahead to encounters, tolerance, working with the Woodsmen groups and their motivation to get fully involved, without the family and clan ties.

Any thought and insights would be appreciated.

[zedturtle]

I'm about to start up running a campaign for the first time as we have finally finished 'Edge of the Empire' for now, been looking forward to this all year.

However, my players all want to play elves. I was hoping for a bit more diversity and have asked them to at least read up on the other cultures and think about it, but don't want to steam role them.

Has anyone else run a single race campaign? I'm just thinking ahead to encounters, tolerance, working with the Woodsmen groups and their motivation to get fully involved, without the family and clan ties.

Any thought and insights would be appreciated.

How many players?

You might want to be clear with them, if they're not familiar with TOR yet... backgrounds are much closer to classes than callings are. For example, a Woodman is essentially a Healer class (or template at least), while Beornings make good scouts and intimidators, etc.

But if they're dead set on it, I'd go for it. Remember, you can swap out distinctive traits and specialities during Fellowship Phases and it would be interesting to see how different one Elf can be from another.

If you have Rivendell, not all Elves are created equal. High Elves will "feel" quite a bit different from Wood Elves. But they'll have even less of a RP reason to get involved with the woodmen...

[Ironbite]

Hi, three players and I tend to run a fourth npc that fills any gaps.

I've brought it up a few times, but they're all being a bit 'humans - bit boring...', so if they are still set on elves I'm going to show them through encounters just how interesting and playable the other cultures are.

I'm just reading through and thinking at the moment, if I start in Lake Town it gives them good reasons to be playing more tolerant characters and hopefully create some distinctly different elves.

[Morgoth]

Are they at least interested in both Mirkwood Elves and High Elves? You could easily have four elves that are all very different from each other.

Do these players know the rules yet? Maybe after you explain how the four traveling roles works, and how encounters work, they might be interested in mixing things up a bit.

If they are all dead-set on playing elves, you could allow them to modify their starting common skills a little bit. I usually allow my players to switch two skills that are within one of each other upon character creation (for example an Elf of Mirkwood who wanted to be the Huntsman could switch hunting 1 and battle 2 to hunting 2 and battle 1). It allows for a little bit of flexibility.

[Rich H]

Has anyone else run a single race campaign? I'm just thinking ahead to encounters, tolerance, working with the Woodsmen groups and their motivation to get fully involved, without the family and clan ties.

Any thought and insights would be appreciated.

Yep, I did it with 3 (sometime 4) players using Hobbits. Did a few adventures and it was fine.

In order to give them a little more variety, I allowed them to shift a couple of points around in Common Skills during character generation - I seem to remember a couple of the players swapped Courtesy with some other (Hobbit-appropriate) skill, but that's all we did and they seemed to work fine. They did share lots a similarities but the players still RP'd very different characters so they still remained distinct and they focussed on different elements within the game as they spent those XPs and APs.

Aesthetically, I quite like the idea of a group of adventurers of the same culture with perhaps one being different - I'm tempted to start up my hobbit campaign again and add in a ranger.

[Fridokind Wargaug]

I too played a dwarf in an all-dwarf-group. It was fun and it had its advantages - we could do all the secret dwarf-things that dwarves do when they are amongst themselves. I guess the same goes for elves. Just give it a try!

[poosticks7]

Well make the NPC a man of the lake (a contact for the elves)

I agree about swapping a few points here and there to make them different from each other (don't go overboard though)

Try and encourage them to play strong personalities that differ considerably so they can play off each other. A grim/serious elf, a curious/learned elf and light-hearted/carefree elf spring to mind off the top of my head.

It is their personalties, traits and specialities that will make them stand out from one another with callings and weapon choices and virtues being other ways.

As a Loremaster play up how 'otherly' they are to simple Laketowners, make them feel elf like.

[Ironbite]

Thanks for all the comments, really helpful.

I've looked at the Wood Elven backgrounds and have suggested to them to look at Envoy, New Hope and Memory of Suffering backgrounds, which should all offer different points of view.

I was thinking about my NPC as a Man of the Lake or mix in another elf, will probably flesh out both and use them when needed.

Thanks again!

[Angelalex242]

It might turn out okay.

After all, I heard that LM Tolkien had 13 players once, and they all wanted to be dwarves. He had to bring in a 14th just to get him to play a hobbit.

[Ironbite]

That made me laugh