In the last campaign I ran, the core races were human, elf, dwarf, goblin, and ogre, but none of the latter four were much like their usual D&D portrayals. The elves were basically half-elves, mortal servants of the immortal High Elf Lords, intentionally bred from humans and fae-kind to be hedonistic thrill-seeking wanderers, adventurers, spies, and news-gatherers. The dwarfs were pastoral farmers and foresters, something between a halfling and a gnome. The goblins were the great miners and smiths of the mountains, but less warlike than D&D dwarves and more calculating, living in a plutocratic society rife with backstabbing political intrigue. And the ogres were basically Warcraft/Elder Scrolls orcs, big and green and savage and noble and loyal and anger-prone but basically solid bros to any adventuring party lucky enough to have one.
In the campaign I'm working on next, it will be set in a vaguely Siberia-inspired region, so I wanted the non-humans to be flavored with Slavic mythology. The game will be very human-centric, but there will also be three playable demihumans: strigoi (a race of witches that appear human but who are mostly hated and feared for their magic-use), domovoi (diminutive house-goblins, it's considered a sign of immense good fortune if you have one attached to your house and secretly doing your chores in the night, but if you give it clothes, it goes rogue…), and leshonki (if the leshy is the Slavic "old man of the forest," basically a slightly more magical ent, a leshonky is a young leshy, an enting in other words, sapling-sized and less likely to scrape on ceilings if it goes indoors).
