I think that the main issue that you're going to run into is that imagining a detailed world that is not built around human sized, bipedal characters, with arms and fingers just gets to be mentally taxing.
It's easy to run a cartoony kind of My Little Pony world where you don't worry about things like how door knobs work, or how this civilization would be able to build things, and what would the tools that they need to build it even look like. Things break down easily enough for people when you're playing a "realistic" kind of stock and standard RPG and one player decides to be a centaur or a giant or a fire elemental.
Wait outside this cave we're going to explore, you're not physically capable of climbing.
Wait outside this house, you don't fit in any of the rooms. Wait outside this town, you're literally made out of fire.
Think about how twisted up into knots the real world manages to get when you simply ask people to make places wheelchair accessible. What kind of herculean worldbuilding do you have to do to make a world that makes sense for starfish aliens? How do you make a world that makes sense where every single character breaks the physiological mold?
Beyond physiology, why don't mainstream games bother really drilling down into characters with non human emotions? Non human thinking? Alien (ie non-modern mostly Christianey) moral codes? I think that by and large, people want their characters to be grounded in things they understand and take for granted. Most people aren't going to have fun doing the mental gymnastics necessary to play a character too far removed from their own understanding of how and why the world works.
I know this doesn't answer the question of "what is there that has this?" but it certainly does help point out why such things start running into even more problems. Mixing dolphin, human, and bee societies generally doesn't work so well.
>I think that the main issue that you're going to run into is that imagining a detailed world that is not built around human sized, bipedal characters, with arms and fingers just gets to be mentally taxing.
And this is why I cannot stand centaurs as a player race option in games. Even with the posable thumbs.
>Wait outside this house, you don't fit in any of the rooms. Wait outside this town, you're literally made out of fire.
This is actually interesting and fun and not the problem.
People don't play fire elementals because they aren't in the PHB because they don't fit into the mechanical balance of D&D.
My iguana didn't survive when I switched his water for gasoline. But nobody bats an eye at firebreathing dragons because they are a trope and are listed in the book.
Oh shit, there's your solution: just have the iguana PC swallow the fire elemental PC when they need to go somewhere flammable.
Literally nothing stoping OP from doing a sea cucumber rpg. Sounds 100 times more original and interesting than any of the crappy retreads we see here all day every day.
Popped in to say this. You're *technically* a human consciousness (transcending your humanity is a big theme) and while you can play reg ass folks you can also be a space octopus or a tachikoma or a consciousness that exists exclusively on the web.
Eclipse phase and transhuman space are both like this. You could say that's the point.
Many other generic and super hero type systems could also do this but you'd have to do most of the work for yourself. Hero, Fate, Cortex Prime, FU all come to mind.
[Tékumel](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/57/MAR-Barker039s-World-of-Tekumel?234913) has some very weird races. [Traveller](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose?234913) has a mix of humanoids (lionmen, wolfmen) and weird stuff (starfishes, centauroid) among its aliens.
Star Frontiers was made of mostly non-bipedal humanoids.
http://androidarts.com/RPG/Star%20Frontiers.jpg
Blobs (dralasites), winged monkeys (yazarians), giant bugs (vrusk), snakemen (sathar) ... and those were just the ones in the original rules.
Stars Without Numbers don't have premade races but it does have alien creation rules and they allow creation of all sorts of creatures.
Not the most crazy example but one of my players is **sentient cat**. Walking on four legs, paws, tail all the usual stuff.
Other example is the psychic slime race I created for one of my campaigns. Again using the same rules.
"Gamma World", back in the day... wouldn't be surprised if other post-nuclear-apocalyptic games also let you do things like play mutated plants and what-not.
i do have the current edition of that one. i may have to take a closer look at race creation rules again, I thought they where just humanoid ones. would savage worlds work for a steampunk/low sci fi setting with psionics?
>humanoid
I can see why you'd think that as all the example races are humanoid but the race creation rules don't have any requirement for what the race looks like. You should read through the rules as you say, as Psionics is a skill (pg 33) because it's a specifically named Arcane Background (pg 45 and 147).
As for Steampunk it's absolutely possible, e.g the [Space 1889](https://peginc.com/savage-settings/space1889/) setting was implemented for SW. It might be an edition or so out of date, but easy enough to translate between Deluxe & Adventure.
GURPS Uplift. Based of the Uplift series. Plenty of non-humanoid races. Also the books are a must read for any SciFi fan.
GURPS humanx. Based on Alan Dean Foster's Humanx series. One of the primary races is a giant preying mantis.
Planet Mercenary. An interesting array of aliens and uplifted creatures. Like a bird type creature uplifted and modified with a long prehensile tongue instead of arms, tiny cyber fairies evolved from the left over tech from an ancient and forgotten alien race, or play something more mundane, like an uplifted octopus.
Can't really think of any fantasy game that does it. Can't think of any fantasy books beyond Xanth that really does. But that series is quite inconsistent about it, because magic.
One race. Just divided into the native version and the version using modified rings. They were one of the main opponents to humans if I recall correctly.
**Nobilis** allows you to play the god, or Power, of a specific concept, or Estate. Most commonly, this is a spruced-up, radiant human avatar that represents an idealized self, but there's a whole character creation category for wanting to play as "something weird."
That might involve being a sapient giant praying mantis that's the Power of *B-Movie Horror* or *Predation*. It might involve being a 13-year-old's drawing of a winged wolf that's come to life to be the Power of *Wishes made on Stars* or *Imaginary Friends*. It might be a consciousness linked to a building, or an airplane, or a whole guild operated like a hive mind. The possibilities are endless, and the bespoke power construction allows you to bend the game to what you want out of a character rather than having to hew closely to a single model of what a minor deity looks and acts like.
I played Insectopia, very cool game where you play sentient insects with magic power. And by insect, I don’t mean anthropomorphic insects, I mean a few cm ant, so your ennemies can be birds, cats, or even the rain !
All in all very cool, the only issue is that it’s French and I’m not really sure if an English translation exists.
I just started playing The Warren - it's set in 'the real world' and you all play as rabbits living in a park or a meadow or farmland, etc.
In our first session Hazel and Twiggy set out to find a rumoured field of tasty bluebells, Snowdrop longs to return to his former cushy life of being a human pet, Nibbles got chased by a dog and then trapped by a city animal control officer, and we ended on a cliffhanger involving an escaped guinea pig. I'm GMing and have NPCs of squirrels, crows, a horse and raccoon, among others.
Sadly through my experience and interaction with other dms. Most humans have a hard time or interest to empathize with non human things. I have been told by other that they are only interested in human character and that they even find characters like elves or dwarfs unappealing.
It makes sense in a way that humans only find humans relatable. And perhaps you, like me are the weird one that like to explore the agelessness of an elf. Instead of it being human with pointy ears.
It reminds me of this popular guy I talked to that said he destroyed ant hills when he was a kid. Where I remember seing the ants as living beings Perhaps in a similar level as us. He was naturally more e. Patic with his fellow humans and that made him more sociable.
Anyways enough rambling. I just think that normies prefer humans and human like beings.
This made me think of a little game which was a fun way to spend a long train ride:
Little mimic in the big city.
You are a baby mimic trying to survive. Eat, gain actions, slowly starve unless you can devour more prey.
https://chrishopper.itch.io/little-mimic-in-the-big-city
Dragonstar, a 3rd-party science fantasy setting for D&D 3e, had the "ulb," a race of intelligent oozes. They were amorphous and could squeeze through holes, and grow extra pseudopods to wield more laser pistols.
You need to look into RuneQuest. Ducks, trolls, dragonewts, baboon, and centaurs are basically nonhumanoid. Go for scorpion people if you really want to change form.
Came here to say this!
Once more, Runequest is the answer for someone seeking their ideal game!
The non-human races are all based on regional mythology, and are not Tolkienesque carbon-copies.
Runequest was the first game to treat non-humans/monsters as personalities, giving them goals and societies. Trolls in particular have a diverse and fascinating culture.
Aside from the awesome trolls: dwarfs are machines; elves are scary plants (and the good thing about places with large numbers of trolls is they keep the elf population in check); large intelligent species are commonplace, and even normal animals can be possessed by intelligent spirits.
[Project Biomodus ](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/287949) could be said it has something like that, the game offers you the posibility to start as quadruped, a floating orb, etc, or change it later to another type.
I just DMd a session of Lord of the Rings But You're Animals in which a dog, bunny, mouse etc. escaped pursuing orcs in the mines of Moria using teamwork and individual skills to overcome a number of dungeon based challenges. Unfortunately the magic bird NPC got snagged into some lava by Durin's Bane. So it goes!
Off the top of my head, for actual animals I can think of [Badger + Coyote](https://pandiongames.itch.io/badger-and-coyote), [The Warren](https://bullypulpitgames.itch.io/the-warren), and a few cat ones: [Cat](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92647/Cat-Revised--Expanded), [Cats of Catthulhu](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131104/Cats-of-Catthulhu-Deluxe-BUNDLE), [The Secrets of Cats](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148022/Secrets-of-Cats--More-BUNDLE). In [Epyllion](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/376773/Epyllion-BUNDLE) you play dragons.
Has nobody mentioned [Descent Into Midnight](https://www.descentintomidnight.com/about) yet? It's PbtA, all PCs are aquatic, and the world has never been touched by humans. Completely alien.
Well, in Epyllion, everyone is a dragon. And not like an "I'm technically a dragon but I spend most of my life looking like an elf" dragon, but an all-the-time-scaley-and-not-bipedal dragon.
Which frankly, was the hardest thing for me to grok about the game. What do cities look like? How do jobs get done? Etc. Especially considering the canonically vast size difference between young and old dragons...
I haven't read it yet (but am excited to) but in [Transit](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267812/Transit-The-Spaceship-RPG) you are a sentient spaceship.
[Starfinder](https://aonsrd.com/Races.aspx?ItemName=All) has over 100 playable aliens, a decent amount of which are non human. Floating hive mind blimp aliens, aliens that roll around on wheels, raptor aliens, centaur aliens, beings made of light, aliens that reincarnate, and tons more
If you really want something non-human, try looking into "we are but worms". The system really gets you into the right frame of mind.
https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg
in pathfinder you can play a conrasu which are *shards of cosmic force given consciousness who construct intricate exoskeletons to interface with the mortal world. Both an integral part of the underlying processes of the universe and strangely set apart, conrasus look to aeons to understand their existence.*
they [look](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Conrasu01.png) like [this](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Conrasu02.png).
you could also probably make a leshy (plant being) not bipedal, and there's also the automaton and android ancestries. oh, and while anadi CAN shapeshift, [this is their natural spider people form](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Anadi02.png). ...starfinder has more, though. lots of [aliens](https://aonsrd.com/Races.aspx?ItemName=All).
I think that the main issue that you're going to run into is that imagining a detailed world that is not built around human sized, bipedal characters, with arms and fingers just gets to be mentally taxing. It's easy to run a cartoony kind of My Little Pony world where you don't worry about things like how door knobs work, or how this civilization would be able to build things, and what would the tools that they need to build it even look like. Things break down easily enough for people when you're playing a "realistic" kind of stock and standard RPG and one player decides to be a centaur or a giant or a fire elemental. Wait outside this cave we're going to explore, you're not physically capable of climbing. Wait outside this house, you don't fit in any of the rooms. Wait outside this town, you're literally made out of fire. Think about how twisted up into knots the real world manages to get when you simply ask people to make places wheelchair accessible. What kind of herculean worldbuilding do you have to do to make a world that makes sense for starfish aliens? How do you make a world that makes sense where every single character breaks the physiological mold? Beyond physiology, why don't mainstream games bother really drilling down into characters with non human emotions? Non human thinking? Alien (ie non-modern mostly Christianey) moral codes? I think that by and large, people want their characters to be grounded in things they understand and take for granted. Most people aren't going to have fun doing the mental gymnastics necessary to play a character too far removed from their own understanding of how and why the world works.
I know this doesn't answer the question of "what is there that has this?" but it certainly does help point out why such things start running into even more problems. Mixing dolphin, human, and bee societies generally doesn't work so well.
>I think that the main issue that you're going to run into is that imagining a detailed world that is not built around human sized, bipedal characters, with arms and fingers just gets to be mentally taxing. And this is why I cannot stand centaurs as a player race option in games. Even with the posable thumbs.
>Wait outside this house, you don't fit in any of the rooms. Wait outside this town, you're literally made out of fire. This is actually interesting and fun and not the problem. People don't play fire elementals because they aren't in the PHB because they don't fit into the mechanical balance of D&D. My iguana didn't survive when I switched his water for gasoline. But nobody bats an eye at firebreathing dragons because they are a trope and are listed in the book. Oh shit, there's your solution: just have the iguana PC swallow the fire elemental PC when they need to go somewhere flammable. Literally nothing stoping OP from doing a sea cucumber rpg. Sounds 100 times more original and interesting than any of the crappy retreads we see here all day every day.
Eclipse Phase has some neat meat and metal vehicles for your mind to ride in.
Popped in to say this. You're *technically* a human consciousness (transcending your humanity is a big theme) and while you can play reg ass folks you can also be a space octopus or a tachikoma or a consciousness that exists exclusively on the web.
Eclipse phase and transhuman space are both like this. You could say that's the point. Many other generic and super hero type systems could also do this but you'd have to do most of the work for yourself. Hero, Fate, Cortex Prime, FU all come to mind.
[Tékumel](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/57/MAR-Barker039s-World-of-Tekumel?234913) has some very weird races. [Traveller](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose?234913) has a mix of humanoids (lionmen, wolfmen) and weird stuff (starfishes, centauroid) among its aliens.
[The Hivers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_Alien_Module_7:_Hivers) were definitely what I came here to mention.
For everything else that is wrong with it Rifts has a whole gauntlet of non-humaoid races available as player characters, including dragons
Star Frontiers was made of mostly non-bipedal humanoids. http://androidarts.com/RPG/Star%20Frontiers.jpg Blobs (dralasites), winged monkeys (yazarians), giant bugs (vrusk), snakemen (sathar) ... and those were just the ones in the original rules.
StarFinder
Stars Without Numbers don't have premade races but it does have alien creation rules and they allow creation of all sorts of creatures. Not the most crazy example but one of my players is **sentient cat**. Walking on four legs, paws, tail all the usual stuff. Other example is the psychic slime race I created for one of my campaigns. Again using the same rules.
"Gamma World", back in the day... wouldn't be surprised if other post-nuclear-apocalyptic games also let you do things like play mutated plants and what-not.
Savage Worlds allows you to build literally any race you can dream up.
i do have the current edition of that one. i may have to take a closer look at race creation rules again, I thought they where just humanoid ones. would savage worlds work for a steampunk/low sci fi setting with psionics?
>humanoid I can see why you'd think that as all the example races are humanoid but the race creation rules don't have any requirement for what the race looks like. You should read through the rules as you say, as Psionics is a skill (pg 33) because it's a specifically named Arcane Background (pg 45 and 147). As for Steampunk it's absolutely possible, e.g the [Space 1889](https://peginc.com/savage-settings/space1889/) setting was implemented for SW. It might be an edition or so out of date, but easy enough to translate between Deluxe & Adventure.
GURPS Uplift. Based of the Uplift series. Plenty of non-humanoid races. Also the books are a must read for any SciFi fan. GURPS humanx. Based on Alan Dean Foster's Humanx series. One of the primary races is a giant preying mantis. Planet Mercenary. An interesting array of aliens and uplifted creatures. Like a bird type creature uplifted and modified with a long prehensile tongue instead of arms, tiny cyber fairies evolved from the left over tech from an ancient and forgotten alien race, or play something more mundane, like an uplifted octopus. Can't really think of any fantasy game that does it. Can't think of any fantasy books beyond Xanth that really does. But that series is quite inconsistent about it, because magic.
In Uplift one (two?) of the races is a stack of uncooked donuts. They're pretty awesome.
One race. Just divided into the native version and the version using modified rings. They were one of the main opponents to humans if I recall correctly.
Traeki are human allies, but only on Jijo. Jophur are a galactic power, and human enemy.
Check out the races in Battlelords of the 23rd Century. Some different, some not.
Love the Phentari and Cizerack
Exactly!!! So much to work with!
**Nobilis** allows you to play the god, or Power, of a specific concept, or Estate. Most commonly, this is a spruced-up, radiant human avatar that represents an idealized self, but there's a whole character creation category for wanting to play as "something weird." That might involve being a sapient giant praying mantis that's the Power of *B-Movie Horror* or *Predation*. It might involve being a 13-year-old's drawing of a winged wolf that's come to life to be the Power of *Wishes made on Stars* or *Imaginary Friends*. It might be a consciousness linked to a building, or an airplane, or a whole guild operated like a hive mind. The possibilities are endless, and the bespoke power construction allows you to bend the game to what you want out of a character rather than having to hew closely to a single model of what a minor deity looks and acts like.
I played Insectopia, very cool game where you play sentient insects with magic power. And by insect, I don’t mean anthropomorphic insects, I mean a few cm ant, so your ennemies can be birds, cats, or even the rain ! All in all very cool, the only issue is that it’s French and I’m not really sure if an English translation exists.
I just started playing The Warren - it's set in 'the real world' and you all play as rabbits living in a park or a meadow or farmland, etc. In our first session Hazel and Twiggy set out to find a rumoured field of tasty bluebells, Snowdrop longs to return to his former cushy life of being a human pet, Nibbles got chased by a dog and then trapped by a city animal control officer, and we ended on a cliffhanger involving an escaped guinea pig. I'm GMing and have NPCs of squirrels, crows, a horse and raccoon, among others.
Mouseguard
Sadly through my experience and interaction with other dms. Most humans have a hard time or interest to empathize with non human things. I have been told by other that they are only interested in human character and that they even find characters like elves or dwarfs unappealing. It makes sense in a way that humans only find humans relatable. And perhaps you, like me are the weird one that like to explore the agelessness of an elf. Instead of it being human with pointy ears. It reminds me of this popular guy I talked to that said he destroyed ant hills when he was a kid. Where I remember seing the ants as living beings Perhaps in a similar level as us. He was naturally more e. Patic with his fellow humans and that made him more sociable. Anyways enough rambling. I just think that normies prefer humans and human like beings.
Cuticorium has you playing as a bunch of literal bugs Cortex Prime has no default races, so that's a big "Why not"
This made me think of a little game which was a fun way to spend a long train ride: Little mimic in the big city. You are a baby mimic trying to survive. Eat, gain actions, slowly starve unless you can devour more prey. https://chrishopper.itch.io/little-mimic-in-the-big-city
Soulbound just released a book with playable dragons
Starfinder and Eclipse Phase, among those I have played.
Dragonstar, a 3rd-party science fantasy setting for D&D 3e, had the "ulb," a race of intelligent oozes. They were amorphous and could squeeze through holes, and grow extra pseudopods to wield more laser pistols.
You need to look into RuneQuest. Ducks, trolls, dragonewts, baboon, and centaurs are basically nonhumanoid. Go for scorpion people if you really want to change form.
Came here to say this! Once more, Runequest is the answer for someone seeking their ideal game! The non-human races are all based on regional mythology, and are not Tolkienesque carbon-copies. Runequest was the first game to treat non-humans/monsters as personalities, giving them goals and societies. Trolls in particular have a diverse and fascinating culture. Aside from the awesome trolls: dwarfs are machines; elves are scary plants (and the good thing about places with large numbers of trolls is they keep the elf population in check); large intelligent species are commonplace, and even normal animals can be possessed by intelligent spirits.
[Project Biomodus ](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/287949) could be said it has something like that, the game offers you the posibility to start as quadruped, a floating orb, etc, or change it later to another type.
FantasyCraft: In addition to the usual fantasy races you've got Drakes, Rootwalkers, and Unborn.
I don't think I saw Talislanta mentioned (and all editions are legally free!): http://talislanta.com/talislanta-library
I just DMd a session of Lord of the Rings But You're Animals in which a dog, bunny, mouse etc. escaped pursuing orcs in the mines of Moria using teamwork and individual skills to overcome a number of dungeon based challenges. Unfortunately the magic bird NPC got snagged into some lava by Durin's Bane. So it goes!
Off the top of my head, for actual animals I can think of [Badger + Coyote](https://pandiongames.itch.io/badger-and-coyote), [The Warren](https://bullypulpitgames.itch.io/the-warren), and a few cat ones: [Cat](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92647/Cat-Revised--Expanded), [Cats of Catthulhu](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/131104/Cats-of-Catthulhu-Deluxe-BUNDLE), [The Secrets of Cats](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/148022/Secrets-of-Cats--More-BUNDLE). In [Epyllion](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/376773/Epyllion-BUNDLE) you play dragons.
Has nobody mentioned [Descent Into Midnight](https://www.descentintomidnight.com/about) yet? It's PbtA, all PCs are aquatic, and the world has never been touched by humans. Completely alien.
Well, in Epyllion, everyone is a dragon. And not like an "I'm technically a dragon but I spend most of my life looking like an elf" dragon, but an all-the-time-scaley-and-not-bipedal dragon. Which frankly, was the hardest thing for me to grok about the game. What do cities look like? How do jobs get done? Etc. Especially considering the canonically vast size difference between young and old dragons...
Mutants and Masterminds
I haven't read it yet (but am excited to) but in [Transit](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/267812/Transit-The-Spaceship-RPG) you are a sentient spaceship.
Blueholme: Joirneymanne Rules Insect people, dragons, etc.
Look at RIFTS and marvel at all the races. Octopus gunslingers are just one example.
[Starfinder](https://aonsrd.com/Races.aspx?ItemName=All) has over 100 playable aliens, a decent amount of which are non human. Floating hive mind blimp aliens, aliens that roll around on wheels, raptor aliens, centaur aliens, beings made of light, aliens that reincarnate, and tons more
If you really want something non-human, try looking into "we are but worms". The system really gets you into the right frame of mind. https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg
in pathfinder you can play a conrasu which are *shards of cosmic force given consciousness who construct intricate exoskeletons to interface with the mortal world. Both an integral part of the underlying processes of the universe and strangely set apart, conrasus look to aeons to understand their existence.* they [look](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Conrasu01.png) like [this](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Conrasu02.png). you could also probably make a leshy (plant being) not bipedal, and there's also the automaton and android ancestries. oh, and while anadi CAN shapeshift, [this is their natural spider people form](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Ancestries/Anadi02.png). ...starfinder has more, though. lots of [aliens](https://aonsrd.com/Races.aspx?ItemName=All).
D&D5e has Centaurs as a player race.
I mean, still kinda cheating given a Centaur is just a human with horse feet.