Race

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Your starting race can be one of: human, dwarf, elf, gnome or orc. All roles can choose to be human, whereas the other races are restricted to only some of the roles. Your race affects your starting and maximum attributes, the belligerency of co-racial monsters, and the safety of sacrificing particular races. Your starting race will also affect what constitutes cannibalism, as well as what creatures can be safely genocided.

Polymorphing into an elven, dwarvish, etc. monster will not affect the above. However, your god will never gift you an artifact that attacks your current form.

Humans can be any alignment (subject to your chosen role allowing that alignment), but for the others, your race indirectly determines your alignment: dwarves are always lawful, gnomes are always neutral, and elves and orcs are always chaotic.

In general, dwarves are strong, elves and gnomes are smart, orcs are poison resistant, and humans are good all-rounders.

Racial intrinsics

Race	intrinsics	Notes
Dwarves	none	Double digging speed
Elves	sleep resistance at level 4	Multishot bonus for elven arrows from elven bows
Gnomes	none	Can use uncursed touchstones as blessed
Humans	none	No infravision
Orcs	poison resistance at level 1	Cannibalism is ok. Multishot bonus for orcish arrows from orcish bows

Maximum attributes

Your race limits your inherent attributes. Equipped magic items (such as gauntlets of dexterity) ignore these limits.

Race	Strength	Dexterity	Constitution	Intelligence	Wisdom	Charisma
Human	18/**	18	18	18	18	18
Elf	18	18	16	20	20	18
Dwarf	18/**	20	20	16	16	16
Gnome	18/50	18	18	19	18	18
Orc	18/50	18	18	16	16	16

Reference: role.c, line 405.

Description

The guidebook offers the following advice about the starting races:

Dwarves are smaller than humans or elves, but are stocky and solid individuals. Dwarves' most notable trait is their great expertise in mining and metalwork. Dwarvish armor is said to be second in quality not even to the mithril armor of the Elves.

Elves are agile, quick, and perceptive; very little of what goes on will escape an Elf. The quality of Elven craftsmanship often gives them an advantage in arms and armor.

Gnomes are smaller than but generally similar to dwarves. Gnomes are known to be expert miners, and it is known that a secret underground mine complex built by this race exists within the Mazes of Menace, filled with both riches and danger.

Humans are by far the most common race of the surface world, and are thus the norm by which other races are often compared. Although they have no special abilities, they can succeed in any role.

Orcs are a cruel and barbaric race that hate every living thing (including other orcs). Above all others, Orcs hate Elves with a passion unequalled, and will go out of their way to kill one at any opportunity. The armor and weapons fashioned by the Orcs are typically of inferior quality.

SLASH'EM

SLASH'EM has new races, as well as changes to allowed alignments and statistics of original races. New races are:

• Drow - Can put monsters to sleep with bare handed attack
• Doppelganger - Has natural protection, very high stats, and the #youpoly ability
• Hobbit - fast
• Lycanthrope - regeneration and lycanthropy
• Vampire - regeneration, very high stats, level-drain resistance, moves by flying, but can only eat fresh blood

Slash'EM Extended

Slash'EM Extended has all of SLASH'EM's races, as well as added ones not present in other variants. In this variant, every race has maximum stats of 25 for every stat, and every combination of role, race, alignment and gender is possible. The new races are:

• Alien - Similar to human, but with worse stats, negative starting alignment record and luck and an annoying loadstone that's hard to get rid off. Basically a harder-than-hard race.
• Argonian - Can swim and is unbreathing, as well as use the healing hands technique. Lizards are usually peaceful to them.
• Breton - Good spellcaster, and starts with resistance to fire, cold and shock.
• Gastly - Starts with many intrinsic resistances, but can only eat old corpses (no fruits, rations or other types of food).
• Gigant - Can pick up and throw boulders. Hungers rapidly. Giants are usually peaceful to them.
• Imperial - Can pacify monsters by chatting to them, but is more likely to encounter out-of-depth monsters and cannot pray successfully no matter what.
• Insectoid - Can summon insects, starts with poison resistance and flying, and uses a poisonous sting in melee. Their lack of hands is a huge disadvantage though. Insects are usually peaceful to them.
• Khajiit - Their unarmed melee attack does extra damage.
• Kobolt - Poison resistant, starts with some stacks of throwing weapons. They will fall asleep every so often though, which can be very bad if they stand next to Demogorgon.
• Maia - Starts with uncurable and uncontrollable teleportitis. They also cannot teleport at will, but their starting inventory contains a wand of teleportation (10 charges).
• Mould - Starts with uncurable and uncontrollable polymorphitis. No risk of system shock or a polymorph level draining them below experience level 1 though. They have some crippling weaknesses while not polymorphed, but they can #youpoly at will.
• Navi - Does extra damage with spears, and their kick does extra damage if they wear wedge sandals (which they start with).
• Nymph - Can steal items by attacking in melee, but starts out chained to a heavy iron ball. The #monster command can't be used to remove the ball, and even if the player somehow gets rid of it, a new ball will appear after a while. Also starts with teleportitis.
• Ogro - Does extra damage with clubs. They aggravate monsters though. Ogres are usually peaceful to them.
• Redguard - Resistant to poison and sickness, and starts with energy regeneration making them very easy to play.
• Snakeman - They can swim and wrap enemies, possibly drowning them or preventing them from moving away. Lack of feet prevents them from kicking. Snakes are usually peaceful to them.
• Trollor - They get very little HP and mana boosts from leveling up, but start out with sickness resistance and regeneration. A trollor has a 75% chance of auto-reviving on death if they're at least XL 3, which makes them a great choice for beginner players.
• Ungenomold - Starts with uncurable and uncontrollable polymorphitis, instantly polymorphs into a random monster upon starting the game, and permanently dies (as opposed to reverting back to ungenomoldic form) upon running out of hit points with no chance of life saving. No risk of system shock or feeling like a new ungenomold, and their polymorphs can't time out either. They can use #youpoly at will. Also starts with warning, searching and lots of techniques as well as a wand of death.
• Asgardian - They get random intrinsics from leveling up, meaning they can get lucky and receive resistances, slow digestion or other good things early. However, Asgardians may also get unlucky and receive intrinsic hunger, polymorphitis or other bad things. Also, they have a 5% chance each turn to move at half speed. Still, they are a good choice for beginner players.
• Senser - Similar to human, but sometimes they get a notification if a monster is spawned. The chance to get this notification goes up as the player reaches higher experience levels.
• Spirit - Lots of resistances and intrinsics, including the very powerful phasing while in their natural form makes this a useful race; however, they always move quite a bit slower than other characters.
• Lich - Lots of resistances and intrinsics, including controlled teleportitis right from the start plus a guaranteed athame means the lich will have a very easy early game. Their downside doesn't become apparent until much later in the game, where high-level monsters have a greatly increased chance of spawning. A lich character is guaranteed to be bombarded with nasty, hard-to-kill monsters in the Gehennom and on the ascension run.
• Clockwork automaton - They can attack thrice per turn, or throw two extra projectiles (including potions and other things that can't normally be multishot), and start with petrification resistance plus some other valuable intrinsics. However, clockwork automatons cannot eat at all. Potions of oil and prayer are among the only ways for them to avoid starvation.
• Curser - A harder-than-hard race, 80% of all items that would have been noncursed will be cursed for them. This includes monster starting inventories. The blessing technique can be used from time to time in order to lift curses (especially if the player's starting two-handed weapon started out cursed), but since most items are unsafe to use if cursed, they will still have a hard time.
• Spiderman - They are poison resistant and can poison monsters. Spiders are usually peaceful to them.
• Illithid - Their brain-sucking attack will quickly kill monsters that have brains, plus illithids also start with some useful intrinsics, but they have a much lower chance to get intrinsics from eating corpses.
• Incantifier - Starts with magic resistance, freeing an equipment slot for other ascension kit items, but can't eat normal food. Instead, incantifiers can only eat metallic and lithic objects.
• Albae - Hated by all other races, many monsters that are normally peaceful will be hostile to the Albae. This includes quest friendlies and certain other "always peaceful" monsters. Shopkeepers won't attack them on sight but prevent them from entering. On the plus side, Albae start with magic resistance and will get some useful intrinsics from leveling up, topping off with the otherwise rare energy regeneration.
• Nord - Cold resistant and sturdy.
• Fenek - Capable of using claw attacks when unarmed.
• Haxor - Steroids mode: if the player chooses this race, monsters will respawn twice as fast, the dungeon will generally be filled with more monsters, items and traps, hit point regeneration is faster both for monsters and players, pets level up twice as fast, special dungeon features show up more often etc.
• Heretic - Similar to human, but they can pray and convert altars even in Gehennom. Trying to convert Moloch's high altar on the Sanctum is still a very Bad Idea though.
• Mummy - Lots of resistances and intrinsics, and they can try to tame undead monsters by chatting to them. Mummies also receive some of the Necromancer's bonuses to undead-related spells like summon/command undead, which means the undead monsters are more likely to become tame.
• Kop - Keystone Kops are usually peaceful to them, and chatting to a peaceful K can tame them. All randomly generated monsters also have a low chance to start out tame to a Kop character.
• Worm that walks - Starts with uncurable and uncontrollable polymorphitis. They are protected from system shock and instadeath by being drained below experience level 1, but unlike moulds and ungenomolds, they cannot #youpoly at will. Instead, the worm that walks has to eat corpses to polymorph into the eaten monster, so if they e.g. kill a black dragon, eating its corpse will polymorph them into a black dragon. There is always a 20% risk of polymorphing into some other random monster, and eating non-corpse food also has a 20% chance of causing a random polymorph. A worm that walks has no hands while not polymorphed, making it much harder to interact with certain dungeon features, but in their natural form they can hide under items which will cause monsters to wander randomly instead of approaching.

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