>>96139293
It doesn't make a ton of sense to me that every race would just be human or human + animal. Why? There should be some explanation.

In MY setting, all playable races are the degenerated offspring of ancient, highly advanced humans. The humanity of that time somehow managed to kill an eldritch god from outside of reality, but doing so fractured their own reality, rewriting the laws of physics into a metastable state that conveniently lines up with common fantasy tropes like magic and other planes of existence.
In the wake of this conflict, most of humanity returned to their ancestral form (or close to it), but even the corpse of an eldritch god is powerful and it warps the forms of many living creatures. Thanks to widespread gene editing and hardcoded genetic limits, *most* of the species descended from humans are still human-ish. This gives you elves, dwarves, halflings, cat people, deer people, lizard people, etc. Some humans degenerated more than others, giving you ogres, trolls, swamp people, and the like.

But there are also semi-intelligent to intelligent monsters, borne of animals or a mishmash of animal and human DNA. They, unlike humans, did not have as many genetic protections, so they take much more varied forms. This is where you might see intelligent frogs, bugs, snakes, birds, or even mushroom people. Again, they rarely resemble humans. Not all of these races form a culture or society, and not all of them even can.
Then there are the creations of humanity, in the past through science, and in the present through magic. Mechanical and magical constructs can be viewed as tools or monsters, but the biological forms are rarely regarded as anything but monsters.
Lastly, there are abominations borne of eldritch magic. Few of these are intelligent and they are always evil.