When I was in 2nd grade, we had a project where we write & draw stories which would then get bound into a book. I wrote a story where the SuperFriends had to go find ALF and Pee-Wee Herman. If I had been designing RPGs at that age, Tales Of Arcana might be the kind of thing I would have come up with.

Is every race/ species/ lineage in this book going to connect with everyone? No. In fact, some of the entries are silly, and that's the point. This book feels like it's main purpose is to inject joy and whimsy right into your eyeballs.

But if you think it's just light-hearted fun, the setting fluff does hint at serious business at times. This is a setting where Kermit the Frog can, nay MUST, ally with Jason Voorhees to save the universe, because REASONS.

And, hey, if you don't like the setting, well, there are enough character options for any number of different settings. Card soldiers, living chess pieces, and talking animals are perfect for a Wonderland setting, just like there are options for Santa Claus, flying reindeer, Easter bunnies, monsters, and leprechauns, meaning you can make the greatest Rankin-Bass holiday special EVER.

The art for the entries is gorgeous, especially in the introductory chapter. One particularly notable piece features an angel fighting a flying saucer, because that's exactly what kind of book this is.

This is the book that got me into 5e after over 2 decades of not touching anything D&D adjacent, and I think it's well worth every penny.

This is largely a first impressions view,

It feels like a memepost. There is a literal manifestation of a twitter user, some race is literally just a butt face, one that is just a box monitor with limbs, sentient automobiles, and a few generic aliens to boot. The cover conveys some of this but I feel it wasn't quite enough. Where I start to take issue is in the contents. It feels more like ideas were just sort of thrown in with little rhyme or reason. Not to mention rehashing already existing races from 5E which leaves me a little confused, isn't this supposed to be a 5E expansion on races? Why include the standard races unless I am VERY mixed up about something here. Then there's the fact that a number of these races read more like professions. A pirate is not a seperate race, it is a line of work. One of the "races" is literally just mages. This author seems to struggle to seperate race from profession and culture, as they seem to often be treated as one and the same in this guide. Another thing is how many of them are described as "human but they come from X" which once again highlights the misunderstanding between what race is and what ethnicity is. Some creatures are just bigger versions of others, such as the zombie to the bulk zombie. These are again counted as entirely seperate races when it would probably be more applicable to have sub-races like how 5E has both deep gnomes and rock gnomes. Maybe it was done like this to include more artwork but they're treated as entirely seperate races layout wise. The thing is it also DOES have standard sub-race layouts as shown by the Spiral entry and the Vroom Vroom entry. It just ends up feeling messy and bloated.

The actual creatures are way too busy, referecing the Spiral again we have a creature that has a modifier that effects its race, dark vision, built in attacks with additional properties, and ability to hold many items at once (though limited in how often it can attack) as well as better grappling, and a high swim speed. If it was only a few like this but it crops up frequently, though some are instead only given a trait or two that does several different things and ends up feeling more like a class of progression like the Navigator which just get spells which improve in various ways as they level up.

I wish I had waited on this, the book contains some nice ideas but must of the races are rehashes of current races with different pictures or names. The whole thing just felt generic. Definately not worth the $25 I paid. It would have been better to make a series of supplements and discuss the races more in depth. Especially if you are just stealing statsw from anoither race.

I backed this book on Kickstarter as a wacky and unconventional option for additional races to use in my own campaigns. I finally got it and have been reading it over, and yes it's kind of wacky, but there's a lot of actually cool worldbuilding in this book. The races are diverse, some of them are standard, like elves and dwarves, some are typical fantasy tropes like trolls and goblins, and some are outright bizarre manifests of dreams in far-away realms. The author did a good job of pulling together divergent worlds in an approachable way. Reading this book makes me feel like I'm walking through an interplanetary city like Sigil and seeing strange alien creatures unlike any I've encountered in D&D before. Really happy with the product. Can't wait to use some of these races and ideas for my own worlds.

The art was good, some of the humor was interesting. But overall, the design was meh, and so many of the races where something my kid might have made rather than real races. Additionally, there is obviously an almost desperate feal to the book. To explain further, some of the races are a ripped of version of Pinocchio, one is literally a human with a but for a face, a Muppet, a want to be transformer, an intelligent horse, an intelligent duck, a slug like creature, animatronic, which has a specific 5 nights at Freddie’s vibe, animated toys, the list goes on with ideas being ripped off at every turn. This might be ok if there was great lore and interesting stats but then we get stuff like. Amazonian or their male counterpart, which stat wise are humans except instead of getting proficiency in a skill of your choice you get proficiency in acrobatics or athletics and shortbow or longbow. so basically, you are a human with slightly more restrictive traits. There is a ton of bloat like this, where it is obviously more of filling pages then producing good material.

Not to say the book is garbage, the art is largely good, and there are a handful of good ideas, the stuff before the races is somewhat decent and there is enough to give a few ideas, but overall, I found it a huge disappointment. If the writer was to redo this as a monster manual, then I think it might have been a lot better as many of these races are more fitting to monsters then they would ever be for a player.

Also, the PDF is password locked so no editing anything in it, and it actively blocks copy stuff from it so it kills much of the benefits of using a PDF, which is really sad. and reduces the use of the PDF even more.

Update: also, no links to races, and since the edit is PW locked, I am not even allowed to add the links to stuff like I normally would which dramatically reduces the effectiveness of it, since this is a review of the PDF I reduced a star as the PDF has worse function then the physical book as everything I would want from the PDF is locked out.

Hate to say it but thus far this is the worst book I have purchased to date.

Amazing, every race is unique for any d&d campaign so many new realms too.

awesome with alot of great races but you can't copy paste stuff out of the pdf and that does make it take alot longer to make your characters in dnd so thats why i give it a 4 out of 5, 5 out of 5 writing, but the dpf is like 3 out of 5 with it also not having any build in link quility of live stuff but it should be point it out wicths brings it down to this

This book is absolutely brilliant! This is not a book your throw at your players and say "Here, all of this is available" This is a grab bag of races that can help inspire campaign ideas, or give use specific races to give a campaign a certain feel. The lore in the book is nice but I feel it is not needed. Each race is fleshed out welll enough to be placed in whatever campaign world you use (published or homebrew). The artwork is gorgeous and makes this book even that much better. I am now starting a Dark Wonderland campaign using just races out of this book. This book is a must have for DM/GM's

Excellent job to all those who brought this book to life!

At basically 500 pages and nearly 450 MB in size, this PDF is massive. Due to the sheer mass of data, I expected a bit of a hassle trying to download it... once I had my copy though, it was well worth it.

This really does have something for everyone.

The Races are incredibly varied, covering a huge amount of concepts (although you should keep in mind that many standard Races, from the Player's Hand Book for example, will be a bit underpowered by comparison).

On the other hand, the lore ties everything together smoothly.

Then there's the question of "meta" topics, such as "what is Race?" and "how do you play something that is immortal?" and these too, are covered.

If it all seems like a crazy amount of content, reading the Preface however might shine a little light on that topic - preparation for this book ultimately started over six years before it made its debut here on Drive Thru and much of the content was in use well before even that.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Manitous - God of Earth and Reality, for not putting too much effort into stopping the production of this fine addition to my collection (though his efforts have been noted).