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The advanced race guide gave people the option to play homebrew races, which were mostly crafted from a selection of preset traits from preexisting races. This got me wondering, could you go further into the realms of the bizzare. So I decieded to try an build a campaign where the players were not average in any way.
1. Not humanlike in many ways(so no core races, and a very limited pool of other races). 2. The playable races made would be drawn from monsters in the bestiarys, or inspired by elements in bestiaries. This means plenty of monsterous humanoids, fey, aberrants, undead, lesser humanoids, plants, constructs, and half-undead/constructs.
3. Monster specific traits could be taken, like a mimics chest like form could be adapted into a half-mimic.
4. Weapon weilding arms are optional. And tenticles, tails and could not wield weapons or perform fine motor functions(as in reload or fire a gun or weapon) without picking up a feat to allow it.
5. Alingment is a non-issue. The players are allowed to do as they wish with the characters, but they must justify any specific actions that would have consequences for the way they percieve the world, and how it percieves them(you may be a monster, but that does not mean you need to act like one all the time)
After this, the general setting would be... You are former employees of various big bands that got slain by the heroes. You have survived your masters downfall and now are free to seek employment as mercenaries and sell-swords. Because there are not that many groups immediately hiring your sevices, and funds are growing short, you decide to do the unthinkable...become adventurers and help the humans you have previously encountered as enemies.
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The main limiting factor is ultimately average party level. If they choose high level creeps, they can expect the same inturn and I am completely fine with hitting extremely powerful groups with the relevent instant lose elements of their vulnerabilities(like banishing the succubus antipaladin.
Another thing is that the race MUST in some way have intelligence, otherwise, they literally cannot think enough to leave their orignial habitat. Now if they actually play an intelligent swarm, that would be fine. Just remember a swarm has no hands, and cannot wear armour. So they have that as a draw back.
Invisable and incorporeal races are subject to the non interaction rule. Namely they cannot own what they cannot touch. And being constantly invisable will get them ran over by a cart, ignored or if noticed possibly nuked. Remember the standard practice of murder hobo adventurers. Wait until there is trouble, then kill the thing for loot.
Finally, they only have starting money for initial equipment, so while powerful races do have an advantage with strength, they do not have advanced magical weapons and equipment.
After some pages of discussion, this thread has an ongoing PDF of Savage-Species-style writeups for various monster races. Though I'm afraid they've taken the PDF down temporarily. It turns out certain decisions made it appear that the document was pretending to be official Paizo material.
I have a saved copy of the last version that was up I could send you--I don't think that would be violating anything.
...Somebody please tell me if I'm wrong.
EDIT: Oh, there was also this homebrew forum full of class-ified monsters. Though I think the forum is D&D 3.5, the posters try to rebuild most of the monster races so that there are no dead levels and so that most classes have interesting effects over blank stat boosts.