Forum

That's a good idea.
One thought is to discuss the invisible forces that are at work in Middle earth, both good and evil. The Powers of good do not use coercive force, but aid heroes who make ethical choices in ways that are not always obvious at first. The powers of shadow have a way of undermining themselves and each other in ways they don't realize until its too late.
Encourage players and LMs to read Tolkien
One excercise I have been thinking of going with my players is to go over their character sheets again and have them come up with a list of things they can do:
I can communicate with my dog
He can tell me if he smells something
He can alert me if something is approaching camp at night.
He can help me guard a captured Brigand
He can help me hunt...
I can make maps to improve our ability to find a good route when we are travelling.
Calligraphy tools are a tough one...not sure what I can do with those.

The players can help eachother with ideas for ways to use their skills
.
Then as the LM I can try to incorporate some of those things into the game so there are things to do besides fighting and looting.

I think a good beginning is to approach each culture and calling individually. The core rules have very good descriptions and explanations of what they can do, but what I think players also need is advice on HOW to play them and how to enact the various features in a manner consistent with Tolkien's characters.

I don't have an idea for the initial outline yet, but I'll think about it, maybe try to address stereotypes up front or at least early (i.e. I had a player who believed that a Dwarf carrying a Bow was anti-Tolkien). I do think examples and comparisons to the movies (both LOTR and Hobbit) would gain traction with more players. The sheer number of prospective players who will know/watch the movies over reading the books is probably huge, in my opinion. I know the movies diverge from the books in a lot of ways, but the movies were still very very good and made by great fans of Tolkien's works.

I wonder if part of the problem comes down to the movies. Even if one wants to quibble with some of the details, I think that the three LotR movies had a good "Tolkien feel" overall. The Hobbit movies, on the other hand, had a very different feel -- more humor and "Warhammer" dwarves and impossible feats of skill (the plates scene, the leaping around on barrels scene, that sort of thing...) and generally felt more like a video game to me than a Middle-earth adventure.

Through that lens I can see where players might watch the Hobbit movies and think, "yeah, I can do that!" and never really grasp the Tolkien flavor.

Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) has some content that let's the player role-play a bad guy. It's an old game now, but that side of the world, i.e. CREEPS (Evil Characters) vs FREEPS (Free Peoples) was extremely popular back in the day. Maybe Free League should put out a supplement that covers role-playing from the Brigand Camp side of things- another kickstarter anyone?

lol- it's still popular. That side of it has been sadly neglected by the devs but the Good Guy side still gets plenty of roleplaying, though it's more difficult for 'newcomers to find, as the game world has got so gigntic (Angmar to Umbar and everything in between) that the old Roleplay hub of Bree is only about 25% of the total roleplay stories going on at any given time. I'm interested in moral gray areas, so it's a way to stay faithful to the literarry material but push at some of the bounds.

I think a good beginning is to approach each culture and calling individually. The core rules have very good descriptions and explanations of what they can do, but what I think players also need is advice on HOW to play them and how to enact the various features in a manner consistent with Tolkien's characters.

Having only just read all these messages I can sympathise with many of you - in regards to a Roleplaying Primer, I actually designed a 'Player's Handout' especially for players used to 'murder hoboing' their way through D&D - I have attached it below - I also recommend you should check out the Discord on TOR/LOTRRP as I'm sure we've discussed these issues on there!
A further point - if your players want to play evil dudes in Middle-earth, let them! I once ran an adventure where all my players played orcs (as they wanted to) - they soon realised that 'playing bad guys' wasn't what they expected!