You will buy this book. The expanded rules on the core races make this something you're going to want to have. All the rules-and a good bit of the fluff-from the Core and APG and reprinted here along with new racial feats, alternative racial traits and alternative class abilities. This is a book that is going to see some serious use during character creation.
Ok that's the good, let's move to the bad. Most of the artwork is ugly. Almost all of the characters pictured look like they dumped stated cha. This holds true even for the races that have a bonus to cha. Additionally, a couple races-most notably the Aasimars and Merfolk-just have flat out bad art. All of the artwork, except for chapter introductions, are static poses. While I understand this for each races portrait couldn't the other artwork have shown more dynamic scenes?
The new races are unimaginative. Among the "new" races are: half-angles, half-vampires, half-shadows, half-fire elementals, half-earth elementals, half-water elementals, half-air elementals, half-demons, half-hags and half-nagas. The ARG may give these races other names, such as changelings, but a good portion of the book is expressly humans crossed with something else.
The remaining races are nothing much to write home about. Many of the races are what should be expected of an expanded races book. Drow, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Orcs and Kobolds all appear. Some interesting ideas from other Paizo products, such a the Tengu and Kitsune also show up. Where the designers do decide to take a risk we get things like the Gillmen, who die if not submerged in water at least once a day. Further, a number of race throughout the book suffer from a truly poor selection of stat adjustments. To give one example the half-hag (changeling) gets +2 Wisdom, +2 Charisma, -2 Constitution. It seems that, under Pathfinder rules, half-hags make poor witches (witches being intelligence based casters).
As I said, most players will likely buy this book for the expanded base class options. Compared with the large selection of imaginative races in Complete Book of Humanoids for AD&D 2nd the Advanced Race Guide falls badly short.
