So I've rewritten up the core races. However instead of having them with their standard racial traits I have split each race into two: One part is associated with the physical aspects of members of that race. The other are the cultural aspects (which have been separated out into backgrounds). In this way if you want to have a half-orc who was raised among elves, then you can do so by choosing the half-orc race and then picking an elven-themed background.
You can find what I've done so far here. I've got each of the core races and 1 single background which has a lot of the the dwarven racial traits.
Each race is pretty much what you'd expect from the CRB. The exceptions are gnomes have had their gnome magic replaced with bond to the land which more represents what I consider to be physical rather than cultural.
Half-elves have had their keen senses replaced with dual minded because otherwise elves and half-elves were identical (keen senses has been included as an alternate racial trait).
Half-orcs have had their darkvision boosted a little bit as they were a bit underpowered compared to the other races.
Halflings also have the fleet of foot alternate racial trait baked into the race, leaving dwarves and gnomes as the only 20 feet speed races.
Humans alas only have their +1 skill point per level. That combined with the bonus feat would have been overpowered IMO. On the other hand humans now gain a wide array of extra traits through their background that otherwise would be off limits to them.
The only background I've included is Sky Citadel Sentinel. This pulls most of the missing racial traits from dwarves along with a bevy of the dwarf's alternate racial traits.
Alternate Favored Class Bonus are associated with background rather than race. Finally bonus languages are granted by their background rather than their race. So you could have a dwarf who doesn't speak dwarven if you were so inclined.
I quite like backported ideas, especially if they're good ones. :)
Thanks again. You can find my updates to Races and Backgrounds here. They are now split into two documents as my Backgrounds section has grown to 14 pages.
Races have had their bonuses changed from a racial bonus to a trait bonus. This means regardless of how you get a trait (whether it's race, background or some other way) you cannot stack trait bonuses. However thanks to alternate traits for both backgrounds and races every race should be able to select every background without having a double up of a bonus. I did this to help balance the characters. "Races" are now much more versatile thanks to splitting them up from races to Races + Backgrounds. So it comes at a cost of not being able to stack as many bonuses on the same thing.
I've also tweaked humans. I reevaluated their +1 skill point to be worth 2 RP instead of 4 RP (there is an optoin available to give them +2 skill points for every level they have, so this has devalued the human +1 skill point per level racial trait). This let me give them a natural aptitude trait for +1 trait bonus to a single skill (thanks to no stacking this is a minor bonus) and a bonus universal traits.
Universal traits are explained in the background chapter. They're the same thing as traits for standard PF. However instead of having them categorised into different categories, they're now just in one big category called Universal Traits. Anyone can select any 2 traits they want. So if a wizard really wants 2 magic traits or a fighter really wants 2 combat traits, just let them have them. Otherwise they'll scour every splatbook known to man trying to get the perfect combination and it's just easier to give them what they want (although a note is added that same campaigns will have special campaign traits that replace one of the universal traits). Oh, I also converted Intimidating Prowess into a trait (and strength replaces charisma rather than add to it).
There are now 7 backgrounds. Regardless of what alternate racial traits you have using the standard Pathfinder rules, you should be able to get pretty damn close to creating that character with the race + background combination. Each background has a small paragraph with suggested flavour. Then they have the background traits. Some have alternate background traits and all of them have favoured class bonuses that make sense for that background.
So that's this thread done for the foreseeable future. I might add a couple of backgrounds later on. But other than that there's no real changes coming up.