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An emphasis on beasts (and beast-like monstrosities) at the lower levels makes sense: "this strange, powerful beast is terrorizing the area, we need a hero to slay it" is a pretty common Greek myth set-up, and the precursor to that, fit for lower-level heroes, is "this beast is causing problems...

Honestly, as long as both racial languages and Common are a thing, Human should be a distinct language from Common anyway. Common as the de facto Human language, which pretty much everyone else conveniently speaks, feels...odd. It paints humans as the default that everyone else bends toward, and...

In a vacuum, I'd say Exandria, as it mostly* keeps the standard fantasy-kitchen-sink fare of previous default settings, but lacks the outdated concepts or other lore baggage of those settings, by virtue of the recency of its creation: its lore isn't entrenched nearly as deeply as the FR's is, so...

My first thought with the Underdark subspecies was to give them blindsight 60' rather than super-darkvision, playing on how real-life animals that live in isolated cave systems (or just purely underground in general) sometimes go beyond "underdeveloped eyesight" to being out-and-out blind. But I...

First idea that comes to mind is a combination of "floating +2/+1" and "move to class and/or background": a +1 tied to class, and a floating +2 as a formalized Ability Score Improvement, complete with the option to swap it out for a feat. (Which has the added benefit, with the existence of...

Ooh, can I play? Dwarves are the species I've got the most ideas on for adjusting to a "no species-based ability mods, almost all proficiencies and languages moved to culture/background" paradigm. (Other than the dropping of ability mods, this isn't something I expect to come into play in 5E...

Not quite the same thing, but one thought I had was to have +1 be tied to either starting Class or Background (probably choosing one of two or three options, in either case), and then at level 1 you get an Ability Score Improvement...which means you get the option to take a feat in its place...

Yeah, I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the species I was stuck on were classic "evil" fodder: when you take away the cultural stuff that pushes them into that niche (or that narrow range of niches), they don't have much else left. (I agree with you about what conclusion to draw...

(This post isn't so much tied to the current train of discussion in this topic as just something that's been churning around in my head for a fair bit, and this seems like as good a place as any to share it.) A lot of the traits that species currently get are more cultural than anything...

I'll admit, I'm far less well-versed in the finer details of D&D's cosmology than I am in those of MtG's, but from what I do know, there seem to be plenty of ways to make the two fit together. The question is more how much to integrate them, and, to some extent, how to avoid subsuming one into...

Sort of? It's not 1:1, but there's definitely a fair bit of overlap. Gods you can swap out for their Olympian counterparts with essentially zero alteration: Erebos -> Hades Purphoros -> Hephaestus Karametra -> Demeter Gods you can swap out for their Olympian counterparts with minor...

Urban fantasy likely fits under either Intrigue or Mystery, depending on whether or not the setting in question features a Masquerade (Mystery if yes, Intrigue if no). Ravnica's an urban fantasy setting that I'd say fits pretty solidly under the "intrigue" category, given that the political...

Doing Theros without explaining planeswalkers isn't that hard: just describe events as the people of Theros at large believe them to have happened. Given how the blurring of myth and fact is one of Theros' big things, there's plenty of room for vagueness and uncertainty about the nitty-gritty...