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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sniffles" data-source="post: 2785263" data-attributes="member: 30035">I had a tendency to think that way myself, and found it inhibited me in playing in the Forgotten Realms because I kept trying to make comparisons. For instance, in LOTR the land is fairly sparsely populated. Look how few other people the characters meet in their journey. Boromir had to travel a long way to get to Rivendell, and he didn't get much opportunity to stop in towns or cities along the way. You wouldn't run into that much in FR. Faerun is pretty well populated, though of course it does have wilderness areas. Middle-Earth really only has one major city, Gondor. FR has numerous big cities. FR has multiple populations of all the non-human races with their own cultures. The humans of M-E have several different cultures, but the elves and especially the dwarves and hobbits are culturally homogenous. Also, in FR, while elves are long-lived, they're not immortal and they do age. M-E elves are immune to aging and disease; they can only die by violence. Hobbits are, according to Professor Tolkien, a subset of humans, while FR halflings are a separate race (and apparently a genetically incompatible one, since we don't see any half-halflings in D&D  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).And then of course there are the significant differences in cosmology: FR has a huge pantheon of deities, many of them race-specific, while in M-E there is only one pantheon, and the Valar (mentioned only once in the movies) aren't even really gods; they're more like archangels. M-E actually has a monotheistic cosmology. Although I suppose you could make a comparison between FR's Ao and M-E's Eru...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I don't think the characters from FR are that similar either, for the reasons that others have already pointed out. Aragorn, for instance, isn't really exiled; he's a descendant of a disenfranchised royal line. I would actually consider Galadriel more similar to Storm Silverhand if you're doing that kind of comparison, but there's still not much similarity there. Galadriel is the oldest elf still living in Middle-Earth! It's too bad the movie didn't emphasize more how old Arwen is, either. If FR elves were as powerful as M-E elves, they'd all have a level adjustment of +2.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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