Mischief Maker wrote:

Piffle, Lord Rocket, you lack imagination. You can certainly create a non-human race in a fantasy realm that’s more than just humans with pointy ears. Here’s an idea off the top of my head and if any indie developers here want to run with it, gawd bless ya!

Deep under the earth a hive of sentient insects live, unconcerned with matters of the surface. But lately more and more humans have been climbing deep into caves and attacking outposts of your hive with fire and magic. The queen wants to know the source of these attacks so she creates a small brood of mimics that can take the shape and memory of any human who the hive has properly digested. The reason the queen only creates a small brood is because she needs the majority of her nutrients to protect against the predation of rival queens.

Your character would proceed to the overworld, have skills, use weapons, and go on worldly quests. Secretly this character would have hidden insect abilities like their jaw would split in half into deadly mandibles or could climb walls like an ant but the queen doesn’t allow you to use these in public.

Save points would be hidden holes where you could crawl back down to an outpost of the hive and secrete your memories for the use of the whole brood. If you die, an identical brood member with all your last secreted skills and memories crawls out, devours your corpse, and takes your equipment.

And while you would seem like a traveling adventurer, your loyalty lies utterly with the queen without any sense of morality or individuality. So say the local king sends you to save the princess who has been kidnapped and offered as a sacrifice to a dragon. You could succeed in saving the princess and she would throw her arms around you and swear her undying love for you, but the hive queen would order you to bring her to the hive to be digested and you would take her to a save hole where skttering workers would carry her screaming into the depths.

Then next chapter you would play a mimic of the princess being escorted by the adventurer mimic back to her grateful father to gather information for the queen from a better position. Say the real princess was an enchantress of some skill, the mimic would have some of that magic ability in addition to the swordplay skills the brood learned from the previous adventurer. You would upgrade human skills only by digesting a human with a higher skill level than the brood presently possesses. As you complete objectives, the queen would reward your brood by granting them nutrients that could be spent on improving your insect abilities or buying new ones.

And in the end, when the mystery is solved and the hive is saved, your brood returns to the depths and has the honor of having their brains eaten by the queen herself while next generation’s larvae devour your remains.

There, perfectly playable fantasy setting with genuinely inhuman PCs.