I'm trying to come up with fantasy more playable MMO races than what are used to being seen. All races should be humanoid. So far I have these, although I'm not necessarily going to use them all, I just want as many as possible to choose from. Demon - Succubus(Female) Nymph - Female only race Half Treant - Closer to human tree-like creature Vampire Wraith Skeleton Zombie Angel Fallen Angel Mummy Pixie - Female only race Gnoll Goblin Elf Dark Elf Orc Human Half Dragon Gremlin Harpy Satyr Cat People - Come up with name Rat People - Come up with name Minotaur - Male only race Siren - Female only Sprite Ogre - Male only Genie 4 Armed Serpent Humanoid - Come up with name Gargoyle Anyone have more ideas?

I suppose the rat people could be called wererat :)
Anyway you're missing many.. kobolds, trolls, centaurs, ...
But a quick googling should give you a much longer list, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons_monsters

D&D Monster Manual is actually where I got most of these, :)

I don't understand why any of these races would be male-only or female-only. Traditionally nymph is the female form of satyr, and a male succubus is an incubus, and I've seen art of male pixies/faeries and sirens and female tauren/minotaurs and ogres.

Serpent humanoids are usually called Naga, although I don't know why they'd have 4 arms. Multi-armed beings are usually associated either with spiders or some other insect, or with the goddess Vishnu.

I second the addition of centaurs (deer-taurs too, and NOT as the female version of horse-taurs), and wonder what you are imagining a siren to look like - personally I would consider them to be the same as a mermaid/merman.

This list is kind of lacking in cute and cuddly races - bunny people perhaps would be good and sheep-people, and angels could be more like bird people, some of them could have bluejay wings or peacock wings or eagle wings. The humanoid-owl moonkin in WoW are also nice and fluffy although it's odd that they have antlers.

Gnolls are sort of like dog-people, but anubises are also a popular race, as are humanoids with dog ears and tails.


Here's an overall suggestion - if you want you players to have a lot of variety of appearance, rather than designing each race separately, you should use a mix and match system for avatar creation and also NPC creation. That way players could create custom mixes like winged cat people and skeletal dragon people, you would only need to make one set of animations for each basic body form, one for wings, and one for tails. Well, you might want to make separate ones for hairstyles and cloaks... But it's nice and standardized to make every piece of gear wearable by any race/gender, and any avatar body part and piece of gear color-customizable. You could also have color-choosable patterns that applied over the whole body (spots, stripes, scales) and ones that applied over the whole outfit (chain accents, gem accents, scrollwork accents...)

You might want to consider the Myconid. They're technically a plant race as far as I know, but they're a mushroom people that look humanoid.

The serpent humanoid the OP is referring to is known as a Marilith in D&D. Its intended to be a demon/hellspawn type of creature and is presented as the head and torso of a human and the lower quarters of a serpent (ie - a large snake tail from the waist down). The extra arms seem to be largely to try to accentuate the otherworldly or unnatural qualities.

Although, the D&D setting does have spider-inspired creatures called Driders, which are yet another centaur-like creature, this time with the hind quarters of a spider. Interestingly though, they only have 2 arms, with the 8 spider legs usually depicted as functioning as legs only.

It does point to just how many potential races there are just by mixing upper half human with lower half of a random animal (or even a plant or element).


I agree that theres no real reason to restrict races to a single gender. From the looks of the list Id say that the majority of the restrictions, even drawing from D&D sources rather than traditional mythology, are based on the singular nature of the creature rather than an inherent need for it to be one gender or the other.

The minotaur for example of course comes from the greek myths and hasnt been changed much for D&D (its still a solitary, brutish creature) - the reason for it being male I would say is due to the fact that originally in the greek myth there was only the one minotaur, which happened to be male because of its purpose in the story. If you're going to make the minotaur an MMO race, though, obviously it can no longer be a singular creature and it will need some method of reproducing and in most cases some form of society.

Although, its possible to include both genders but have significant differences between them within the race. For example, you could take the pixies and sprites and combine them into a single race with females as the pixies and males as the sprites.

There may be some races that do work better as a single gender, though, if they can reproduce asexually. Sunandshadow mentioned succubi and incubi, and I can potentially imagine them as two seperate, but balanced, races that are called into creation by magical forces (or a mad wizard, or a demon overlord, etc) rather than mating.

Its mostly a matter of presentation. For the most part, Id say your players are more likely to want a rough gender equality. But you can get away with it if you put enough thought into the background.

Try reading wikipedia's List Of Legendary Creatures.

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Original post by caffiene Its mostly a matter of presentation. For the most part, Id say your players are more likely to want a rough gender equality. But you can get away with it if you put enough thought into the background.

Yeah, I agree with this - I personally would love to see a MMO that had a playable hermaphrodite race, and actually developed that culturally.

Thanks for the suggestions and references guys. :)

I agree that the 'races' in most MMO games are a bit bland and that more diversity should be added in. I do not completely agree that adding more playable races fixes this, not by itself.

The more races you add, the more complex you make your world and the factions within it. If you are going to add a number of races, they will require cultures and a history. If races are just randomly added with no seeming reason behind it, it tends to make the races boring and merely a cosmetic addition.

Also, try expanding into venues that are rarely seen. The animal people thing has been overdone imo. What you don't see are intelligent animal races. Instead of trying to make a race more human (commonly done for familiarity) try to make it more animal. Having a race of wolves, that are still... well, wolves, with an almost/equal/greater than human level intelligence would make for a unique societal ideas.

To sum it up, give your "new" races a reason to exist, and get away from the norm, just don't go crazy!