Hi!

First I wanna say, that TROS is the best RPG I've played since 17 years!!!!

But I want the (real) Halflings to be played by my group, gnomes, Orcs ect. (standard LothR races and so on).

Are there any suggestion posted before. I coudn't find them.

Thanks for Your replies, and sorry if my English is not perfect.

Greetings

I just recently got "Of Beast and Men" and it seems to have alot of good ideas and rules for different creatures. I am sure that with some tweeking you can bend the priority system so it accepts orks, goblins, Ents and the like. I am currently doing the same for "Wheel of Time" and the system is very flexible.

Brian.. How would you go about it?

Raymond Caleatry

Thanks Raymond!

I ordered OBaM but my dealer still doesn't have it yet.

Hmm.. try searching again, I'm sure we discussed this a couple of times in the past. Try "Dark Sun" threads, as I think we talked about it with Dark Sun races etc.

What would I do? Well, it depends on what you want. The racial priorities are based more around rarity than power in "as it comes" TROS (although there's no denying that the power vamps up once you add sorcery and such). You could take that approach, or in your game world you might like to base it around the bonuses (rather than trying to balance the races all against each other as D&D does). So if you decide that Elves get bonuses to Reflexes and so on, but you don't penalise their Endurance like D&D did (which was just a balance thing, really) then maybe Elves have a race priority of D or E instead of F. That kind of thing.

As for the actual stats/bonuses themselves for the races? I dunno... but once you DO come up with some, post them here, I'm sure everyone will want to see them :-) (Or develop them here as a group exercise, the forum's been pretty quiet recently anyway, just be prepared for the fact that everyone will have slightly different ideas about what bonuses and penalties various races should have *grin*).

Oh, and your distributor should have OBAM very soon, the new print run copies were shipped about a week ago now.

(edit: Oh yeah, like Raymond said, there are quite a few races in OBAM that could do for fantasy orcs and elves and such with a little jigging).

Brian.

Dwarves are already covered for you. Page 194 - rock dwarves. It's a pretty minimal set of stat bonuses but I think it's sufficient. You could maybe add darkvision or something if you wanted.

I'd say the stats for The Seelie begining on page 193 would work for gnomes too, but I'd add the "little" flaw as well.

The Fey-Siehe pg. 195 work well for elves.

Halflings pg. 196 probably works well enough for half-elves.

Gols pg. 197 work well for orcs and uruk-hai.

Gorem pg. 225 works for trolls (or giants if you want them really nasty), but you need to add sunlight vulnerability.

You've got your Tolkein style basics pretty much already covered in the core book, plus D&D gnomes. You only need hobbits/halflings now. I'd say something like this:

"Little" flaw
-1 Str
+1 Per
+1 Will
Sneak skill at SR 6.
They are ungifted by default. Gifted Halfings are a different priority, if they are even allowed at all.
maybe I'd throw in the "Intuition" and/or "Area Knowledge" gift, but I suppose those would be open to debate.

Is anything else notably missing? I would agree that reworking the priorities might be good for a more high fantasy feel - whether you decide to stick with rarity or go with power balancing.

Thank You for Your suggestions. It's true, in the core TROS Book are a some races to be taken over.
Next week I have a little, or a lot more time to work "my" races over.
I will let You know.
Perhaps You have some suggestions and can give me some advises.

And... ofcourse get gnomes the short-flaw.

I also will do the stats for playable races like avians(bird-man),(not that I've seen them in another rpg *g*), minotaur (not so strong as in D&D) and wulfen.
But I try to let my players think about them twice to take the races. Because I want to keep the "tros-touch" alive for other races being more rare then in D&D. for example.

Oh, hope I have not so much grammar mistakes in my text.

Have a nice day.
Greetings from Germ... aahm ... Stahl,

Dirk

PS: Hope for our American friends that the hurrican monster will get weaker as soon as possible!

If you have to opportunity you might want to check out Decipher's LotR rpg that came out last year. Not only is it a decent system (complete with a mechanic that works similar to SAs) it's also a good judge for how Tolkien-eske races can be used. As far as races go they are not balanced, even amongst the varying elven races. I've used it as a rough guideline for making more traditional races in the past.