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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 5389808" data-attributes="member: 40177">I really don't like "stranger in a strange land" characters, mostly because they usually wind up sounding hackneyed and cliched.  I much prefer players exploring the rules of a culture that might have different values than the players themselves.  For example, I have run campaigns where slavery was a normal and accepted part of society - there was never any "Free the slave" adventure, and in fact, those who opposed slavery in the campaign were generally depicted as villains or fools.  It was sort of neat to see the players embracing a cultural tradition that was 100% opposite their personal beliefs.  For what it's worth, I'm a history/anthropology guy, and I tend to focus a lot on cultures in my campaign world, so maybe that's where some of this comes from.In my current campaign world, there are only a few human "ethnicities", but mostly because the campaign takes place in a rather small geographic area.  I generally depict the people as having one shared linguistic root and a shared background, but ethnically the people are diversed, as all humans in my campaign are usually the descendants of lower-class or slave-class workers from an ancient, fallen empire.In my next campaign (Dark Sun), I expect there to be a much larger variety of ethnic diversity, ranging from sub-saharan peoples (Gulg) to Middle Eastern (Tyr, Uruk) to asian (Nibenay) to Meditteranean (Balic) to East Indian (Raam).  Not to mention all the desert tribes.</blockquote>

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