Dungeons & Dragons: Weirdest Races To Use In 5E

The roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons was heavily inspired by The Lord of the Rings, and all players want their group to be as awesome as the Fellowship of the Ring. The Fellowship brought together humans, hobbits, dwarves, and elves, while D&D groups have access to a much wider range of fantasy creatures.

There are a number of races in the Player’s Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons players to choose for their character. These include the regular fantasy races, as well as a few unusual ones, like the dragonborn and the tieflings. Once players start digging into the optional material for the game, they’ll find some truly bizarre choices for their character race. These include birdmen, magical robots, and creatures from Greek mythology.

As the D&D multiverse grows, more and more races have become available to players. The people who are sick of choosing human Fighters, dwarven Clerics, or elven Wizards might want to add some flavor to their own personal Dungeons & Dragons game by choosing some of the weirder races on offer.

Weird D&D Race: Rabbitfolk

Rabbitfolk were included in an Unearthed Arcana article, which means that they’re still considered to be playtest material. The content in Unearthed Arcana articles generally makes its way into future Dungeons & Dragons books, so it’s likely that Rabbitfolk will return in the future. Rabbitfolk are denizens of the Feywild, where they can be found leaping from place to place. These creatures might seem like the friendly creations of Enid Blyton, but they make excellent warriors and thieves.

In D&D Rabbitfolk add their Proficiency bonus to their Initiative checks, are proficient in Perception, can use their Reaction to add a d4 to failed Dexterity saving throws, and can hop a great distance. These traits make Rabbitfolk the perfect DUngeons & Dragons race for scouts and frontline fighters. The players who use the Samurai subclass from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything can even create their own D&D version of Usagi Yojimbo.

Weird D&D Race: Naga

The worlds of D&D and Magic: the Gathering have been growing closer every year. There are several books that bring planes from Magic into D&D, like Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros, but the official D&D website has free Plane Shift documents that stat out some of the Magic creatures and races for the game.

The Plane Shift Amonkhet document outlines the Naga race from Magic: the Gathering as a playable race. Volo’s Guide to Monsters has stats for Yuan-ti Purebloods, but these only possess some serpent-like traits. The Naga are full snake people, with a long tail instead of legs. Their unusual body shape allows them to spring forward in a flash, which lets them move in for the kill and either crush their opponent like a constrictor or bite them and let the poison do its work.

Weird D&D Race: The Reborn

The Eberron Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting has magical robots in the form of the Warforged. A recent Unearthed Arcana article also introduced an artificial lifeform for players to choose as their race, but this one has a much more tragic origin, as the Reborn are the Frankenstein’s monsters of D&D.

The Reborn can be created in a number of different ways. There are some Reborn that were members of another Dungeons & Dragons race, one who perished and returned to life, but their experience with death has altered them forever. There are also some that are stitched together from different corpses and have gained sentience as a new lifeform. There are some advantages to being an unnatural abomination, as a Reborn doesn’t need to eat, sleep, breathe, or drink. They also have advantage on saving throws against poison/disease, have resistance against poison damage, and have advantage on all death saving throws. A Reborn might be one of the strangest races in Dungeons & Dragons, but its encounter with death has made it surprisingly hard to kill.

Source: Wizards of the Coast

About The Author

Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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