Nifft said:
IMHO, 6+ races in a world is silly
IMO, the only problem with having 6+ races in a world is that inevitably one or two of them are stronger than the rest, and everyone gravitates to those optima. This is made worse by the fact that if "core" races are always at LA+0, you're effectively limited to "balanced" stats with a few flavor abilities thrown in, which means there are only a few combinations to work with. This is especially a problem in a point-buy system; what's the point of giving a race +2 DEX, -2 CON if a player's just going to spend two extra points on his CON score and two less on his DEX?
In the end, no one ends up playing the Half-Orcs, and you're left with the "Star Trek" universe: all the "aliens" are just humans with bumpy foreheads and one single character trait that defines their culture (as if any culture on Earth could be simplified that much). If your race can be described as "Humans, but with (blank)", then you're suffering from this. The Illumians, unfortunately, are one of these races IMO.
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On to the solution:
One thing my friends and I learned from our homebrew campaign: things are MUCH more interesting when every race is the equivalent of LA+1 (using Soldarin's ECL system to balance). You can stack on far more abilities, to the point where the races aren't nearly so similar and can't be "spoofed" simply by spending your points/Feats differently. That allowed us to add more races without overlapping so much with the existing ones; in the end, I think we had 8 playable races and 3 common subraces, plus 5 distinct half-breed combinations. Of course most of these didn't get played by the PCs in our campaign, but that wasn't because they weren't good enough.
In some cases, we just upgraded the core races to a more powerful form (think Paragon rules); the Humans, for instance, now get +2 skill points per level, the usual free Feat, automatic Martial Weapon Proficiency, choose a few skills to be permanent class skills, and so on. They're by far the most flexible race, but they pay for it by being the only race without an attribute boost; since the other races aren't restricted to "balanced" stats, this isn't minor. (The "elf" race is DEX +4, STR -2, CHA +2, for instance, and has a 40' base movement and a Swim movement.)
My point is this (and I apologize if I went too far off the original topic): imagine a campaign where everyone's an Aasimar, Tiefling, etc. In that sort of world, having a "strange" race like the Illumians isn't so big a deal, since you can give them enough abilities to make them truly
different, instead of just Humans with funny marks on their heads. Now yes, you could get the same effect by making a bunch of 1-level templates or PrCs that changed you, but at that point it's the same effect.
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