- +2 Wisdom, -2 Charisma: Luminous are gifted with insight and a strong bond to both divine powers and the positive energy plane. Their rigid beliefs and values sometimes lead to the luminous being characterized as harsh and closed minded, and this often impairs their ability to interact with others.
- Medium-size: As Medium-size creatures, luminous have no special bonuses or penalties due to their size.
- Breathless: Luminous do not breathe, so they are immune to drowning, suffocation and attacks that require inhalation.
- Poison Immunity: As beings of energy, luminous have a racial immunity to all natural poisons. This ability does not protect the luminous from magical or supernatural poisons
- +4 racial bonus on all saving throws vs. Necromancy magic. As beings of positive energy, the luminous have an increased resistance to the powers of necromancy.
- Unique Anatomy: As a being of pure energy, a luminous can intensify his natural glow to match the effects of torchlight or moonlight. A luminous can also dim this glow at times when stealth is called for, but this is more difficult to accomplish. A luminous must make a Fortitude save (DC 20) to dim his glow for a number of rounds equal to his Constitution score. The character can attempt this any number of times, but it requires a Fortitude save each time. The luminous’ unique anatomy also allows him to be excepted from a rogue’s sneak attack.
- Turn Undead: Luminous are treated as having one virtual level in the cleric class for the purpose of being able to Turn/Rebuke Undead. If the luminous gains levels in the cleric class, her virtual stacks his actual cleric or paladin levels for the purposes of determining his Turning result.
- Outsider: Luminous are native outsiders.
- Automatic Languages: Lumin and Common.
- Bonus Languages: Celestial and Elven. A well-traveled luminous can learn a wide variety of languages.
- Favored Class: Paladin. A multiclass luminous’ paladin class does not count when determining whether he suffers an XP penalty for multiclassing. The luminous are inherently suited to lives as champions of law and goodness.
- Level Adjustment: +2. Luminous are slightly more powerful and gain levels more slowly than most of the other common races of XXXXX (haven't yet thought of a name for my world). See the Powerful Races sidebar for more information.
Stat mods: pretty much a wash.
Medium size: nothing special to see here
Breathless: This is actually pretty good - immune to anything that requires breathing is something that IME is almost always useful
Poison Immunity: Pretty good - less important if you never run into anything with poison, but IME it's awesomely useful.
Necromany resistance: Never a bad thing to have a bonus on saves against necromantic effects.
Unique Anatomy: Glowing like a torch is something of a wash (I'd make the Fort save to suppress the glow get tougher, the longer it's been suppressed). Immune to Sneak Attack - damned handy and awesome - the way it is worded implies to me that Crits would also probably be negated, which just makes an already powerful ability even more so.
Turn Undead: as a 1st level cleric ... 1st level turning isn't great, but, it's not a bad thing - so a minor benefit.
Native Outsider: quite good - immune to all those pesky charm/dominate/hold person spells, they've gotta toss a higher level spell at you, and, it's not a common type, so you won't usually run into issues with bane and favored enemy effects. And, you can still get brought back to life with the lower level effects.
Languages: 2 automatic languages is good, only having 2 bonus languages isn't so good.
Favored Class=Paladin: Meh, this goes against the charisma penalty, paladins are heavy on the charisma.
Basically, it's all pretty useful stuff - it's not an LA +2 - it's more, it's at least an LA+3.
Not knowing the source material version, I can say that if I were building a positive energy based creature, and wanted a low LA, it would have a vulnerability to anything that involved negative energy.