One of my major goals for my setting is to completely overhaul the races. In principle, this means making variant race options for every "main book" race option (so excluding setting books and adventures). I'm not all the way there, but I'm close for the currently playable races.

Goals:
  • Separate biology from culture; base races are biology, while sub-races are cultures.
  • Tie all the races into the setting.
  • Be SRD compliant, which means renaming and modifying any non-SRD race.
  • Have ok balance; some imbalance is acceptable because I rarely play with powergamers or min-maxers. Thematic matching is more important than strict balance.


Note: I will not be allowing the new racial modification rules set to come out with the new book.

PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p5B...ew?usp=sharing

Races appearing here:
  • Dragonborn (5 sub-races)
  • Dwarves (3 sub-races)
  • Half-elves (6 sub-races)
  • Hobgoblins (2 sub-races)
  • Humans (3 sub-races)
  • Jazuu (2 sub-races) -- based on the goliaths
  • Orcs (6 sub-races, including half-breeds, who are not a separate race)
  • Ophidians (3 sub-races) -- based on the yuan-ti, but with significant lore and mechanical modifications
  • Plane-touched (2 sub-races) -- folding aasimar and genasi into one bucket
  • Soul-forged (2 sub-races) -- homebrew pseudo-warforged
  • Tieflings (3 sub-races) -- not part of the plane-touched because they have strong internal variability in-universe.


Still to come:
  • Breaking the elves out into 5 separate races ("high", "wood", "shadow", "dark", and "sea" roughly), each with one or more sub-races. More elven cultures exist in-universe, but haven't come into the play area yet.
  • halflings
  • "beast" races (tabaxi/tortle/aarocokra/kenku/lizardfolk-equivalents)
  • goblins and bugbears. There's an in-universe reason why these aren't really playable right now.
  • firbolg-equivalents
  • tritons-equivalents
  • eladrin-equivalents