Sylphs, the people of the air, are slim, quick, and graceful. Their skin tones range from light blues to white, with quickly-growing hair in similar tones but a few shades darker.
Sylphs are protogynous hermaphrodites. A typical sylph develops as female around the age of 14, marries a male (ie, older) by the age of 18-20, and bears a couple children. Around the age of 35, the sylph reaches menopause and begins to re-develop as male. By 40, it will marry one or more females (ie, younger) and father some more children. Sylphs remain attached to all spouses for life, so this practice creates complicated family structures. In old age, they are tended by their younger spouses (who are generally also male by that point). Casual homosexuality is common and accepted, but nearly everyone marries into the family structure even if they never have children.
Racial abilities
Fast +1 rank jump
Life cycle & Reproduction
Ed. note: inspired by life cycle of salmon and various other aquatic creatures.
Most non-undine have difficulty telling male and female undine apart. They are broadcast spawners. Once per year, both males and females produce large amounts of gametes, which they expel together in shallow, flowing water. Some eggs get fertilized; most do not. Fertilized eggs drift out to sea where they grow into fish-like larvae. Undine larvae they have the intelligence of animals and eat just about anything that they can fit into their mouths, including each other. They are also preyed upon by many creatures of the sea. At the age of four or five, as one-meter tetrapods, larvae swim back to the shallows where they were spawned and crawl ashore. There, they are adopted back into the community of undine that spawned them. Over the next five years of their lives, the larvae metamorphose into humanoid body patterns, with the accompanying large increases in brain size and intelligence; by the age of ten, a young undine looks and acts much like a similarly-aged youth of most other races.
A sad property of communities that get destroyed or abandoned is that undine larvae continue to crawl ashore there and die of exposure or predation over the next few years. Because of this, undine consider that causing a community to become abandoned is one of the worst things that a person can do, worse than any murder or atrocity. Undine who learn of an abandoned community will frequently drop everything to move there. Conquerors who slaughter or drive out the inhabitants of a community will immediately re-settle the area with someone. Spawning away from a recognized community's mating area is considered a perversion of nature; any undine caught doing this are likely to be forced to settle there for the next five years in case any of their children return (this is one of the few situations under which an undine will have any idea who its sires are). Dumping sewage or other waste in bodies of water is also considered a major crime by undine.
Since it's widely accepted that undine larvae eat each other, cannibalism is not stigmatized in undine society. It's rare for undine to deliberately kill each other for food, but some communities practice funerary cannibalism and few undine will turn down any source of fresh meat if other food is running short.
While undine larvae can extract all of the oxygen that they need from water, adults don't completely lose this ability. They can't extract enough oxygen from water to support higher consciousness or any significant activity, but undine cannot drown in water with normal oxygen levels: they will lose consciousness when drowning as other races do but will then carry on breathing water until exposed to air again or something else kills them. Unless the water is contaminated with poisonous or disease-causing agents, having one's lungs filled with water has no health consequences to an undine.
Racial abilities
+1 rank swim Cannot drown in normal water Cold resistance
Life cycle & Reproduction
Ignans are oviparous. Mature iganan females undergo a monthly egg cycle. If the egg gets fertilized within about a 1-week window, she carries the developing embryo for a second month as it grows to roughly 6 pounds and develops a tough, leathery exterior. Eggs need to be kept warm and hatch about three months later. Unfertilized eggs (called "ootes"), weighing about 2 pounds, are expelled at the end of the monthly cycle. They are gelatinous with soft exteriors and are the primary food of ignan hatchlings for the first years of their lives. Since one oote per month is not adequate to sustain a hungry, growing hatchling, ignan females tend to live in large family groups where they can support each others' offspring.
This process puts high metabolic demands on ignan females and frequently causes medical issues. Ignan females correspondingly have notably shorter average life expectancies than males and higher dietary requirements. However, the birth ratio is nearly even. This would lead to a very skewed gender ratio later in life were it not for the violent or hazardous lifestyles of many male ignans.
Hatchlings have large, toothy mouths and clawed limbs suitable for tearing their way out of their own eggs and for grasping and biting into ootes. These traits diminish as hatchlings grow up. Due to the typical social structures of ignan females, it is common for ignans to not know exactly who their parents are.
Ootes spoil within a few months, so they cannot be hoarded long without access to refrigeration or suitable forms of magic. They are a common trade item. Adult ignans generally consider ootes to be delicious, but due to their value, it is rare for adults to eat more than a token amount of oote. As a dominance display, many conquering groups of ignans will eat every oote that they can scavenge from a victim population, thus leaving their children to starve.
Ignans almost always live in settlements with at least 20-30 adult females, almost never in isolated single-family dwellings. Rather than living on their farms, ignan peasants live in villages and commute to and from their fields every day. Polygamy is common: wealthy and powerful males gather harems to match their stature. Consequently, unattached males who avoid the traps of servitude or slavery may travel the world looking for fame, wealth, and notoriety.
Life cycle & Reproduction
Ed. note: inspired by life cycle of anglerfish and George+Kuato in the film "Total Recall".
Female oreads are much like other humanoids. Males are tiny, helpless, barely-sentient things designed solely for mating that permanently bond to a female. Most female oreads bond to a male once fully grown in their mid to late teens; the male is about three years old at that point and no bigger than a newborn. The bonding process is takes a couple weeks to complete and is medically hazardous to both parties. The male embeds itself into the abdomen of the female, leaving only eyes, a mouth, and small arms protruding. Its digestive system and lower body, never well developed, atrophy almost completely. Much of its skin morphs into an organ that draws nutrients from the female's blood supply. The male doesn't need to eat or breathe but maintains rudimentary lungs to allow it to speak in a soft, squeaky voice. An implanted male has no external ears but can still hear through the female's skin and connections to her skeleton. A female with an implanted male is almost entirely in control of her own fertility, being able to get pregnant almost at will.
On occasion, the implantation process fails. This is invariably fatal to the male and frequently to the female as well. If the male dies for some reason after implantation, the female body will try to expel; this fails about half of the time without medical intervention. Some other medical conditions can also cause a female to expel an implanted male, with similar results.
Culture
Oread culture frequently stigmatizes adult females who lack a bonded male. Prosthetic fake males are not unheard of. Oread fashions tend to expose the abdomen so that the male can see and use its arms.
Racial abilities
Radiation-resistant Bonus to perception from the male Extra pair of (small, weak) arms from the male
Like marsupials, except that the male has the pouch. Transfer like seahorses.
Heat-resistant
Life cycle & Reproduction
Ed. note: inspired by life cycle of tunicates and most land plants.
Humanoid dryants are actually children. In their mature, adult form, dryants are trees. Mature dryants can live for centuries; they usually retain some trace of a face, though even this fades with age and extremely old dryants are almost indistinguishable from common trees. Mature dryants are hermaphrodites that occasionally produce huge, beautiful flowers. If pollinated by a particular species of moth, the flower will grow into a large pod; after about a year, the pod will split and a dryant child will emerge. Newborn dryant children are about a meter tall. Dryants posess a limited form of ancestral memory: newborns can walk, talk, and feed themselves (which isn't hard, since dryants can subsist on wider varieties of plant material than other races), but can't read and don't share their parents' skills or memories. Newborns are usually dangerously naive. As they age, immature dryants are eventually taken by an irresistible urge to find a patch of moist soil with good sunlight and there "put down roots" -- literally. Most dryant communities keep a "Grove of the Ancestors" where they try to guide their maturing elders, though some still complete their metamorphoses on roadsides, in fields, out in the wilderness, and in some wildly inappropriate places. Dryants born to remote parents may be exposed to all sorts of dangers, but due to the rarity of dryant flowers, few flowers are fertilized outside of a Grove of the Ancestors. Dryants don't have parental relationships like most races do; young dryants are generally treated as wards of the community and live in dormitories with other dryants of similar age (or with a succession of foster parents in smaller communities) until they've fully grown and learned enough to live independently. They value this practice as it allows youth to learn from many elders rather than only a few, and it allows elders to specialize in teaching youth in particular age ranges.
Immature dryants are asexual. Nudity is normal in dryant society. Clothes are typically only worn as protection or for access to useful accessories such as pockets.
Mature dryants can survive in a remarkable range of habitats, but can't tolerate extreme cold, extreme wind exposure, or severe drought. For obvious reasons, they can't live underground or under water. Immature dryants likewise avoid these conditions and spend little time at sea, especially as they age.
Immature dryants can communicate with mature dryant trees. This ability requires constant touch and results in very slow communication, equivalent to a few words per minute. Further, communication slows as the mature dryant ages: a truly ancient dryant is unlikely to speak more than a few words per day, if one can get it to respond at all.
While dryants can digest the same foods as other races (and a number of other things besides, including most leaves and some bark), most prefer to eat only things whose harvest does not kill the creatures that produced them. A few carry this to extremes by refusing to eat seeds or eggs, but most consider those to be acceptable. While mature dryants obtain most of what they need by photosynthesis, even immature dryants gain some benefit from sunshine: a dryant's dietary needs are halved for any day that it spends at least 8 hours in direct sunlight (not wearing clothes, of course).
Culture
Due to the difficulty of distinguishing old dryants from common trees, dryants are very careful about what trees they cut and use wood far less than other races; where possible, they prefer to build and craft from stone, metal, and bone. Burning wood is avoided whenever possible and cutting a living tree for the purpose of burning it is simply not done.
Dryants prefer to be no more than a few steps from open sky and generally avoid going underground. They gather minerals only from the surface, or trade for them with other races. While they may live in buildings made of stone or sod, their architecture favours as much natural light as possible.
Ed. note: inspired by Vantablack and other nano-engineered light-absorbing materials
Thanays have deep black skin, so much so that their features are difficult to see. A clean, dry, and naked thanay looks rather like a black void in the shape of a person. Their most visible characteristics are their white teeth and their eyes which reflect red light. Under certain lighting conditions, their eyes appear to glow in the dark. These two characteristics often make them look "creepy" to those unaccustomed to them.
Due to their lack of apparent features, non-thanays tend to have difficulty telling thanays apart. Thanays themselves claim to be colourful and highly distinctive. This is presumably only apparent under infravision. They also have unusually good vision under low light.
Since thanays absorb most incident light, they may overheat in direct sunlight. They can compensate by sweating profusely, though this requires them to drink a lot. Sun-shading clothing and avoiding work in direct sun are other strategies for managing body temperature.
Thanay skin can be used to make dark camouflage clothing. Ordinary leather tanning destroys its useful properties, yielding a result little different than ordinary leather that has been dyed black; only certain time-consuming and expensive processes give good results. Even so, leather lacks the self-healing of living skin so such clothing wears out quickly (again, yielding something similar to black-dyed leather). However, thanay skin is relatively easy to acquire even through legitimate means: Enalia has a large thanay population who have no compunction about selling the body parts of their dead. Even better, lack of skin has little impact on a zombie.
Life cycle & Reproduction
??
Their family relationships are extremely varied, including various combinations of monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, heterosexuality, and homosexuality, but most groupings are formed for life. Sexual relations outside of marriage are unusual and discouraged.
Their dietary needs are similar to other races. However, thanays find nearly all foods that are palatable to other races to be bland and tasteless. Consequently, thanay cuisine relies heavily on spices and garnishes, most of which are poisonous to other races.
Racial abilities
Low-light vision Infravision Blend into darkness: A thanay gains 1 rank stealth and may hide in plain sight in low light or darkness. This may be negated by wearing highly visible clothing. Poison resistance Easy to raise as undead? Body secretions are poisonous to most other creatures
The valkyr are one of the great enigmas of the world: they appear to have not been created by the Twelve and no one knows their origins. However, they do share in the gift of the Guardians. Uniquely among humanoids, they can fly. Their dual-purpose wings/arms are much stronger than their legs, making them slow and awkward on land. They mostly eschew mixed communities, instead building their own settlements in mountainous regions around the world.
Valkyr society is peculiarly pacifist: they usually won't commit acts of violence even in their own defence. That isn't to say that they're defenceless: they are masters of illusion and weather- manipulation magic. In fact, during the Long War, one Dragonal army spent 14 months besieging an illusion, taking heavy casualties from disease, weather, and accidents in the process, before discovering their error (the 600-year old dragon leading the army was executed for incompetence). Their ability to fly also allows them to put their settlements in places that are difficult for outsiders to reach or traverse. Most valkyr extend this pacifist philosophy to vegetarianism, though many will eat insects, worms, and other "lesser" animals.
Life cycle & Reproduction
Once per year, female valkyr enter a mating period that lasts about a week; if they become pregnant, they lay clutches of up to three eggs a month later. These eggs hatch after another two months into tiny, helpless young that must be fed soft, easily digestible foods for the first years of their lives. Most vaklyr hatchlings do not live to their first birthdays, but those that do can expect longer lifespans than most humanoids. Valkyr society places great importance on hatchlings' first birthdays; in many communities, names are not assigned to hatchlings until their first birthdays.
Male valkyr have a similar mating period, of about two weeks, once per year. Except during these mating periods, male and female valkyr are difficult to distinguish. Both sexes are likely to mate with many partners during their respective mating periods, but sexual activity outside of these periods is considered abnormal. During their mating periods, valkyr exhibit brighter colours, distinctive odours, and higher aggression.
The valkyr have the peculiar property that they can cross-breed with any of the Accursed races, but regardless of the race of the second parent and its manner of reproduction, the offspring always eventually grows up into a valkyr.
Racial abilities
Slow Flight (poor manoeuvrability.) Pacifist: -4 on attack rolls vs. living creatures. Gain knowledge bonuses instead? Alternate template without this?