Humans make up more or less half of the population on all of the major continents (except tempest island). They come from all walks of life, but in Arcadia, all nobility is human (current "regent" notwithstanding) and they are widly veiwed as making the best wizards due to their remarkable stability against magic.
You know what a human looks like
Playing a human:
Once per day you can automatically succeed ANY check to resist a spell or magical misfire
AND
You can re-roll one dice when leveling up
High Elves are also common worldwide, and while they might resemble strangly beautiful humans they are much more susceptible to magic. Elves sometimes show traits like antlers or tufted tails or colored hair as a result of ambient magic when they were born. Elves commonly have purple eyes and silver, blonde, powder blue, or pale purple hair.
In Kutaii elves might control noble clans, and kutaii has even had elven rulers in the past. In the North they are treated with caution as superstition holds that their susceptibility to magic can attract misfortune. In Arcadia and Heatwave they do not hold official power, but tend to be nouveau riche.
Playing a High Elf:
Once per day, an Elf can gain advantage on a CHA check
AND
See perfectly well even during dark nights (however, not in pitch black or underground)
Halflings are the much smaller cousin of the elves, and share their unusual traits, tufted tails being particularly common.
Halflings make up a huge portion of the population in Arcadia, particularly in the countryside, and to a lesser extent in the North. Outside of that, they are rare.
Halflings can have any human hair color, and occasionly elven shades like light greens and blues, and have pointed ears, although to a much less extreme length than elves.
Playing a Halfling:
Test initiative with advantage
AND
See perfectly well even during dark nights (however, not in pitch black or underground)
Halfdragon/Drakyn/Dragonkin are various names for the offspring of a dragon and a humanoid.
While they have the same genral shape as their human or demihuman parent they are taller, sometimes by a foot or more, and have wings, tails, and clawed draconic limbs. They have patches of scales in the color of their draconic parent
Playing a Half Dragon:
The ultimate dragon weapon, you share a form of your draconic parents breath weapon that you can use once per session, doing 2d4 damage to 1d6 nearby enemies
AND
You can fly breifly (2 turns) as long as you are below half encumberance, rounding up. While flying you are considered "nearby" the ground beneath you (Aka, out of melee range but well within arrow range(about telephone pole height, no flying out of deep canyons))
You cannot use a sheild while flying.
Half Giants, calling themselves the "Great Men" live in tribes on the far eastern edge of Arcadia. Each tribe claims to be the one tribe of men who received their hight as a gift from the the gods and all the rest are just evil degenerate hill giants they are sworn to destroy. They look very similar to humans and have brown or red hair, but even the tallest human might only come up to their shoulders.
Playing a Half Giant:
Gain +1 Starting HP and +1 HP per level.
AND
Once per day, a Half Giant can gain advantage on a STR check
Dwarves are an odd member of the underdark dwelling races, or an odd member of the true humanoid races depending on your perspective. Short, bearded, humanoid and living deep underground and moving transports of rare gems, metals, and underdark crops to the surface on the backs of giant lizards, dwarven merchants are a common sight in arcadia, the north, and kutaii, though they usually keep to themselves.
Dwarven life revolves around 'guilds', vauge categories of profession like "farming" or "stoneworking", each of which have their own expectations for clothing, apperance and different pronouns in dwarvish, and 'clans', groups of more or less identical related dwarves forming a family. There are no distinct female dwarves, every dwarf is truely the sole parent of their children, and veiw this as the ultimate work of their craftsmanship, leading to the aboveground superstition that dwarves are carved from stone. This is also why clans are almost identical. As most dwarves put a lifetime of effort into perfecting the "craft" of raising their child, clans grow very slowly.
Playing a Dwarf:
Once per day, a dwarf can gain advantage on a CON check
AND
Once per day, a dwarf can gain advantage on a check to haggle a price
"Spirit Beasts" or "King (Animal)" are the druid terms for rare kind of magical animal that can assume human or bipedial forms.
They can change form a nuber of times equal to their level/hit dice per day
Carp, Cat, Crane, Dog, Pseudodragon, Fox, Hare, Monkey, Sparrow, Dolphin, Falcon, Frog, Lynx, Octopus, Owl, Weasel
Frost Men live in the very farthest northern reaches of the world, living on icebergs. They are completly immune to the cold and ice cold to the touch. While they trade frequently with fishing villages in The North, they are viewed with distrust as "Ice Pirates" there, and are exotic to the point of myth in the rest of the world.
They have blueish-white skin and black hair, and typically just wear light furs due to their immunity to the cold. Every one of them covers one eye with a mask, eyepatch, or strip of cloth due to their unique magic: that eye contains a naturaly occuring cone of cold spell that they can cast daily.
Playing a Frost Man:
You can cast 'cone of cold' once per day by uncovering your eye, doing 2d4 damage to 1d6 nearby enemies
Gnolls are "beastmen" of heatwave
Mousefolk, a rare species in Arcadia and unknown anywhere else are one of the smallest sapient species, sliggtly smaller than halflings
Aarakokra are large, predetory birdmen living primarily in isolated areas of the north. Unlike Kenku, they have wing-arms with talonlike hands at the wrist joint.
Kenku are smaller, lighter birdmen with scaled arms and wings from their back.
Goblins are a contentious race; for the first few months of their lives they know nothing except blind devouring, and for the next decade or so they know nothing but blind obediance to whoever tells them what to attack. But once a goblin grows old enough to think for themselves they gain a cunning intellegence. While most goblins put it to use to bolster their hives, those who end up
"Common Knowledge" is that Hobgoblins and the other "goblinoids" are different castes of goblin; in fact they are only very distantly related if at all. Hobgoblins specifically are the most goblin-looking, sharing the squashed batlike noses of goblins, but the resemblance ends there as hobgoblins have similar hights and builds to humans. Hobgoblins also have skins in a rich rainbow of colors, black sclera, and occasionally skin-covered horns from the forehead. Hobgoblins are common in kutai and rare everywhere else
Bugbears are the rarest of all the 'goblinoids', spread thinly across kutaii and arcadia. They have longer, more "beastial" faces than their relatives and a thick coat of orange or gold fur, giving rise to a number of "wolf-man" false alarms. Bugbears live reclusivly, alone or in very small family groups, and
Orcs are almost exclusivly found in the eastern plains of arcadia, where they make a living off of the constant wars between the half-giant tribes.
Veggiepymies & Needlemen are one race of sapient plants found exclusivly in the far northeastern edge of arcadia.
Kobolds
Troglodytes are not nominally part of the fishman empire on a species level. However, troglodytes are employed as mercenaries so frequently that they have an official rank as a caste in the fishman empire, officialy for diplomatic reasons only. Unofficially, the sahuagin see their access to troglodyte mercenaries as exclusive and will attack anyone else who seeks them out, and hope to intigrate the troglodytes as an official warrior caste within a generation. The line between mercenaries who deal exclusivly with the sahuagin and being in the army of the sahuagin gets thinner each year.
The greatest minds of the fishman empire have concluded that Babblers are not sapient. A great wizard of much renoun has confirmed that the suspisiouly scentace-structured noises they make cannot be translated by a 'comprehend language' spell. As such, it is clear that babblers do not speak a language and are not sapient. Reports of babblers lighting fires and using tools on tempest island are unsubtantiated rumors.
Playing a Babbler:
TODO
BUT
You don't have a mechanical drawback because roleplaying a character who can't talk is it's own drawback
(babblers CAN learn and understand languages, both written and spoken. writing with crocodile hands is hard, and takes an action and DEX test PER WORD. If you fail you break whatever writing utensil you were using)
Bullywags are short, halfling sized, frogmen. Distrusted by land dwellers for being an aquatic race and disliked by the aquatic empire for being hard to put to use, bullywags live on the fringes wherever they go.
Despite the sheer number of races that are compared to frogs in the sense of laying hundreds of eggs in hopes of a few survivors, bullywags lay 2 or 3 large eggs and care for them, and once they hatch they have a very conventional family life.
They are typically greens, yellows, and browns, but the huge seperated population of them on tempest island can be very brightly colored.
Playing a Bullywag:
Test initiative with DOUBLE advantage
AND
Gain advantage on DEX tests related to Climbing, Acrobatics, and Jumping
BUT
Your Hit Die is a d4 regardless of class (does not effect starting hitpoints)
Pity the poor Crabmen. Previously, they lived on the southren coast of heatwave, and were occassionally raided by sahuagin willing to risk their armor and claws in hopes of killing and eating a crabman, who the sahuagin claim are the most delisious animal alive. When the sahuagin began to organize their empire, enslaving the crabmen was an early step. Now, it is debatable if any significant amount of the crabmen can still be called sapient. Most have been subjected to dark magic and psionics to become obediant, automoton-like muscle for important sahuagins. Others have been made into fearless gladiators or obediant livestock. A crabman who has retained his mind and escaped would be a rare thing indeed (but, that is what player characters are for)
Crabmen are hulking, hunched, humanoid-ish bipeds with a carapace that runs from almost black or browns to vibrant reds and blues.
Playing a Crabman:
You have 2 points of permenant armor that automatically repairs each day
AND
You do 1d6 damage unarmed and a Crabman Warrior may use "Dealer of Death" unarmed
BUT
Disadvantage on ALL CHA tests
Sahuagin, the grand leaders of the fishman empire.
Kua Toa
Dark Stalkers & Dark Creepers
Grimlocks
Chameleon Men are decended from the people who lived on the continent before the incursion of the plane of fire. They have multi-coloured skin with tiger-like stripes of red, blue, green, yellow, brown, orange, black and white. They shun the idea of living via the cast-offs from the plane of fire