Races

Twelve races are designed and documented for Monsters & Memories, and nine of them are playable when Early Access opens on 1 October 2026. The three that are not in the launch set are the Deep Dwarf, the High Elf and the Troll. All three have full lore entries and complete class lists in the official material, so they are finished designs rather than sketches, but the developers describe Early Access as carrying a subset of the races planned for the 1.0 version, and those three fall outside it.

The distinction is easy to miss because the two facts live in different places. The race catalogue presents all twelve as equals with no launch labels at all, while the availability list appears separately in the Early Access material. Anyone quoting a flat figure of twelve playable races at launch has read the first without the second.

Race is one of three choices made at character creation. The other two are class and faith. The combination of all three, not race on its own, decides which of the four starting cities a new character wakes up in, and the developers have said in writing that some of those race, faith and class assignments will be revised before Early Access opens.

The twelve races

The nine launch races

Nine races can be rolled on day one of Early Access: Deep Elves, Deep Gnomes, Dwarves, Gnomes, Goblins, Halflings, Humans, Ogres and Wood Elves. The launch list is written with plural race names while the lore catalogue uses singular headings, which is a styling difference and nothing more.

All eighteen classes are in the game at Early Access, so a class is never gated behind a later patch. What limits a character is the race list attached to each class. Humans are the only race with access to every class, and even that entry carries a qualifier: the official wording is that humans can be every class depending on start location.

The three races held back

Deep Dwarves, High Elves and Trolls are documented as designed races and are not in the Early Access launch set as of September 2026. The official material does not give them a release window, a patch number, or a phrase like coming soon, and it would be wrong to invent one. It says only that Early Access carries a subset of the races planned for 1.0.

There is one supporting development note. A mid-2023 progress report logged a deep dwarf proof of concept while halflings and ogres were already being modelled and rigged for play, which is consistent with the deep dwarf sitting further back in the pipeline than the launch races.

Classes by race

The eighteen class race lists and the twelve race class lists describe the same data from opposite directions, and they agree exactly. The narrowest lists belong to the Monk, open to three races, and the Inquisitor, open to four. The widest belongs to the Fighter.

Surface and deep

Three of the twelve are explicitly subterranean, and each is a descendant or offshoot of a surface race rather than an unrelated people. Deep Gnomes descend from gnomes and emerged changed after the great cataclysm. Deep Dwarves formed from the same titan's blood as dwarves, where it ran into the darkest crevices below. Deep Elves were driven underground after the wars that followed the collapse of the Calafrey Conglomerate. The shared naming is a genuine lore pattern and not a coincidence of translation.

What the official material does not publish

As of September 2026, no racial stat block exists for any race in Monsters & Memories. There are no attribute values, no modifiers, no resistances, no size or movement figures, and no lists of racial abilities. The race catalogue is lore plus a class list and nothing else. It is worth stating plainly because the genre convention is the opposite, and a stats table invented to fill the gap would be fiction.

The one trait-like statement anywhere in the official material is that some races can take the Infravision trait, which sits inside a named Traits system alongside class traits. The material does not say which races, and it notes that the Traits system itself may change in a future revision. It is also worth knowing that light is a real concern in play, with a candle, torch and lantern progression covered under Items and Equipment, which is what makes infravision worth anything.

Faith is confirmed as a character creation axis and several powers are named in the lore, including the Shadow, the Fae of the Branch, the dwarven titan and assorted dark and fallen gods. Despite that, no pantheon, deity roster, or list of selectable faiths has been published as of September 2026.

Orcs, minotaurs and lizardmen appear in the game's concept art. None of them is a race. Concept art is not a roster.