 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Shappy and I'm about to cry because it's Friday as I'm writing this and an unearthed arcana just dropped as I was rendering my finished video for the week. So while I track down the home of whoever made this scheduling decision, I will also be reading up on the six new races being offered up to our judgy eyes. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you can't see that the inclusion of astral elves and space hippos are arrows pointing at a future spelljammer book, then feel free to play your games however you want. And real quick, I'd like to give a brief shout out to my new patrons this month. Eric Diaz, Laven Rose, Joseph Nessie, Space Cowboy776, also known as Ash, Juniper Olyphant. Thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon. It is through you that I can continue to fund my never-ending desire for dice. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So this UA starts off by shaking up the usual elvish basket of subrace eggs by instead giving us an entirely new race called the Astral Elves. Astral Elves saw Corlan in the sky and decided to go follow him, then got stuck in the vastness of space and floated forever, becoming effectively immortal and losing all sense of emotion like their Shadarkai cousins. Much like normal elves, they have dark vision, fey resistances, kin senses, and trances, but they are separated from the OG elves by getting a free Dancing Lights, Light or Sacred Flame Cantrip to represent them being stars, a free Get Back Up ability that heals them once per long rest when they succeed in a death save, and two free swappable proficiencies in whatever they want when they finish their trance, emblematic of them reaching out and using the skills of their past life. Despite the fact that unlike normal elves, astral elves practically never die, so I don't know which past life they could have used to learn baking skills. Regardless, this race is perfectly fine. The pick me up is once per long rest, so it's about as good as the half orcs protection, and the spells are just neat things to help accentuate the characters, so I'd honestly re-flavor this as any kind of elf that I want, since Star Child is such a broad term that I can apply it to anything. Good soup. Next on the list of this should definitely be a subrace, but somebody is trying to be extra. We have the Autonome, a robotic simulacrum built by rocknomes in their image to complete miscellaneous tasks and also make Warforged players jealous because these guys are considered constructs. Despite being small gnome duplicates, Autonome still get a normal 30 foot move speed, as well as a base AC of 13, a d4 that can add to roles and amount of times equal to their proficiency modifier, the same mechanical nature and centuries rest that Warforged get, two free tool proficiencies of their choice, and a special trait that lets you heal from both normal spells that wouldn't affect constructs and the Mending spell, although Mending just makes you spend your head die. Overall, I'm not gonna lie, I'm just gonna change the size to medium and call this the new Warforged because it does everything that I expected that race to do. It's great with tools, it heals off Mending, and actually is a construct. The only thing that I would do with this is, despite the lore friendliness, I'd allow the race to be either small or medium, and flavor it instead as the gnomes building facsimiles of whatever they want. Nothing here is making it be a gnome. But, next up are the gif, who both confused me when I first encountered them in Mordenkain's Tome of Foes, because what the hell is even this hippo man, and also made it much harder for me to explain to my friends that a bipedal african herbivore from space was hiding in my fantasy book because the names GIF and GIF are so close together. Now, in the case, the GIF doesn't actually have a lot going for them, getting only a swimming speed, which I'm sure will be helpful in space, and two features in the form of Damage Dealer, which lets you reroll ones on weapon damage, and Hippo Build, which is like powerful build but shaped like a river horse because you can also have advantage on strength faced abilities and saving throws. I'm wondering what the thought process was around giving the GIFs so few abilities because I can see Damage Dealer and Hippo Build being useful, but they also might get boring really quickly because they don't feel like any specific type of creature, they just feel like strong man, and we've already got an entire class dedicated to strong man. Anyways, moving on, it's time once again to open the gates and let the furries inside because we're getting two races that are just animal butt legs. The Hadozi are monkey people often found on ships due to their natural tendency of climbing all over shit, which makes them really good bosons. Hadozi will, of course, get a climbing speed equal to their walking speed, they can be medium or small depending on whether they're a normal primate or a capuchin, they can use objects as a bonus action, and they can apparently unfurl their skin flaps and fly around like a squirrel, giving them better control over their descent, and giving them immunity to fall damage as a reaction. I wasn't aware that monkeys could actually do that, and now that I know that the Kalugo monkey exists, I want to thank whichever zoologist is in the development team for being so dedicated to monkey science. That said, while rules is written using an object is normally in action, I've never found a DM who actually runs it that way, and for that reason I'm inclined to change the ability to something more useful, such as being able to hold a third object in their tail or a foot. That's still not crazy useful, but it might be a good alternative to having an ability that people are gonna homebrew over anyway. Next up, get ready to shake the ass of your protoplasmic mask because plasmoids are ooze creatures of medium or small size that just float around as cosmic jelly and vibe to the tune of the universe. When they meet other people, they're usually considerate enough to shape their goop into a humanoid form and create synthetic vocal cords to talk, but when they go to sleep they just become a puddle, and that instantly makes them the greatest thing that has ever or will ever exist. Plasmoids can squeeze through any space over an inch wide, they have advantage on all things grapple, they've got standard issue, dark vision, they can hold their breath for an entire hour, they have resistance to acid and poison, and in addition to shaping themselves into whatever form they desire, they can separate a small part of their body and use that pseudopod to go grab stuff or move it around. I love this thing, I love everything about this thing. Do not change this thing, its freedom is what gives it strength, and if you have to nerve anything, get rid of the resistances. I like them, but removing anything else would be a personal betrayal to me. Please put this in a book as soon as possible. The end. Finally, if you like slime, there's another thing that you might like, bugs. Technically, three kreen are shaped like praying mantis slash ant creatures, but you can live whatever kind of bugs life you want. Medium or small, the three kreen are considered monstrosities. They get chitten armor that makes their base AC-13, they can camouflage their armor to get advantage on stealth checks, they get standard issue, dark vision, they get two tiny arms that can hold light weapons, they do not need to sleep at all, but still have to keep from doing strenuous activity if they want the benefits of a long rest, and they can telepathically communicate with anyone they want by waving their antenna around. Here is another race that has a lot going for it, but also not much. The arms are gimmicks, the AC bonus is only semi-useful because every class gets their own way to boost AC already, the advantage on stealth is nice as is telepathy and not needing to sleep, and all of this bundles into a race that will definitely feel distinctly different from all of the other races without overshadowing them. Overall, this UA tells me two things. First, and most obviously, we're getting some spell jammer in the future. Fuck yeah. But more importantly to me, Wizard seems to be making a more serious effort to turn race options into a legitimate choice. Races have always been a thing that you think of secondary to class, except when it comes to the roleplay aspect. But most of these new races actually feel like they're doing something completely unique among the ever-growing pool of character choices. They actually feel like different creatures. Half of them aren't even humanoid, which is a big step up from when Wizards was too scared to make the literal robot race into robots. I'm very excited for the future and I hope that this trend of giving miscellaneous environment skills to help flesh out races continues. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoy this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, and check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to transform myself into a non-humanoid race. But yeah, Dabby out.