Some outliers, and otherwise underwhelming
The ability scores, the alignment restriction, the PC/NPC disparity on aging, the limitations on raising, and the prohibition on divine classes are weird features that are out of keeping with the design precedents set by Wizards of the Coast. Some of those are more important than others, but they all warrant a closer look. A couple of them—most notably the alignment and divine issues—are very serious problems.
There are also some minor wording and formatting issues. The whole “(1)” “(2)” thing is awkward and I don’t recommend it.
Other than those things, the race doesn’t have a lot going for it. LA +0 races often don’t have much going for them—the half-elf and half-orc, say, are laughable even compared to this—but the good ones do. There doesn’t seem like much here to really sink one’s teeth into, that says “oooh, that’d be interesting in combination with X,” or “ah, this would be really good for Y.” Whether or not that’s important to you is personal opinion, but it’s definitely something that a lot of players are looking for, and without finding it, seek out some other race to play as.
Yes, you are correct that this race is probably better than elf—it’s pretty well established that elves are pretty bad. But aside from the bonuses to Intelligence and Charisma, nothing here is terribly exciting, certainly not worth putting up with the problems and accepting the lack of anything more exciting. You’d only ever bother with it for a bard, sorcerer, or wizard, most likely. Maybe an artificer, and at a stretch perhaps factotum if that’s allowed. That’s pretty limited.
So I’d really prefer they have net-0 modifiers, and something more unique and interesting to be all their own, that might make you actually look at a wide variety of classes differently if you’re a sidhelien. Not many official races manage that, of course, but the best—and most popular—ones do.
Ability Scores
You have a net +2 ability modifier: that’s not really an LA +0 thing. People differ on how important they think this is—and there are some... very dubious official examples (e.g. Player’s Guide to Faerûn’s lesser planetouched, Savage Species’s anthropomorphic animals) where this rule isn’t followed, but personally, I think it’s pretty important, and do not like LA +0 races with any net ability modifiers.
Also, Strength is the least important ability score. I know the Dungeon Master’s Guide calls it the most valuable, and the Player’s Handbook gives half-orcs a −4 penalty to offset the +2 to Strength they get, but Wizards of the Coast was simply wrong. Melee characters may be concerned with Strength, but they can always use Weapon Finesse if they like, and everyone else absolutely doesn’t care about the score much at all.
On the other hand, when speaking of penalties, Constitution is the most notable one, and you’ve got that too, so the idea is still there. A −2 penalty to Constitution is a serious drawback, and a +2 to anything else more-or-less fails to offset it.
But one of the quirks of the system is that it’s really hard to find a +2 to Intelligence or Charisma without a −2 to Constitution. That means if you want that starting 20 in either score, you’re looking at taking that Constitution penalty. Again, there are some exceptions, but for the most part it’s true, and those exceptions deserve a critical look themselves even if Wizards did write them.
If we assume that the norm is that a +2 Int or +2 Cha comes with −2 Con, getting both, on a race that has a net +2 overall, is a big deal. Those +2 Int-or-Cha/−2 Con races aren’t super-popular, but they see play—because Intelligence-based and Charisma-based characters are some of the most powerful in the system.
Which is basically where I land on this: this race is looking like the choice for a starting 20 in Intelligence or Charisma. There basically isn’t any competition for it. That’s a bit niche, but not so niche, so I have concerns about this being centralizing.
Immunities
Sleep immunity is nice, though not amazing. Disease immunity is meh. Obviously these are non-negative, but they’re not much in the “pro” column.
“Immunities (1)” and “Immunities (2)” is ugly and awkward, in my opinion. Either give them names, just call them “Immunities” and lump them together, or—following the official precedent—leave them without names.
Senses
A big shrug. Low-light vision is better than nothing but only so much (and very campaign dependent because a whole lot of DMs just don’t bother with the whole light minigame; it’s fairly complex to play out on paper). The skill bonuses are small.
The same naming concerns apply to these as Immunities.
Weapons
Elven proficiencies are nice, but almost everyone who is ever going to make a weapon attack is going to get these proficiencies and more from their class. Mostly a low-level convenience for wizards and sorcerers (who are, admittedly, fairly likely candidates for this class).
Sleep
Probably best off just copying the wording from the Player’s Handbook on this. Also, you should probably highlight that it’s different from the elven version in that the same 8 hours are required, rather than 4 as elves require.
Timeless
Ditch the PC/NPC dichotomy; it’s not adding anything, and it’s not something this system does. PCs and NPCs follow the same rules for almost everything (the only exceptions are things specific to adventuring, e.g. XP and the treasure that adventurers find).
There are timeless races out there: they fall into one of three camps:
- they don’t take the aging penalties or gain aging bonuses at all. (e.g. elan)
- they take both the aging penalties and gain the aging bonuses, they just don’t die of old age. (e.g. warforged)
- they gain the aging bonuses, but don’t take the aging penalties (e.g. Dragonwrought kobolds)
Version 3 is the only one with a balance concern. Version 3 is, legitimately, a big balance concern, and you shouldn’t allow that (you saw how concerned I was about a +2 net modifier; try making it +11 and see how that goes)—it’s absurd that Races of the Dragon did (and astonishingly, the book explicitly states that this is a feature and not a bug).
But you can still easily choose 1 or 2 without any concerns whatsoever about balance. Maximum life is—in almost every campaign ever—an entirely fluff concern. Adventures play out over weeks or months, not years, in almost all cases. Birthright might encourage some of those longer campaigns, but there are plenty of ways for powerful characters to stave off death if it really comes down to it. And, for that matter, the venerable modifiers are generally not considered optimal—mostly because −6 Constitution is seen as more than a bit suicidal by most adventurers, no matter how much they’d like +3 to their mental scores.
(Necropolitan from Libris Mortis is an easy way out of this problem—and out of the race’s own −2 Constitution for that matter—but that template is pretty well overpowered and that’s not really relevant to the analysis of this race.)
Nature Stride
You should indicate if this is an extraordinary or supernatural ability—it being based on pass without trace makes it seem plausibly magical, so it’s worth noting. That said, it’s probably easier to just copy the druid’s woodland stride and trackless step features. There’s some precedent for that, since the Oriental Adventures bamboo spirit folk get trackless step.¹
- Note that the arcane hierophant is a somewhat popular prestige class that has a requirement “Special: Trackless step class feature.” Some people have argued that bamboo spirit folk meet this requirement, and some DMs have allowed that. Insisting on it as a “class feature” is an exceedingly fine hair to split, and not something the editing standards at Wizards of the Coast would generally support. But, as written anyway, it doesn’t work and it’s not a concern. I only mention it because if you add another race that gets trackless step, you might run into players asking the same question. Personally, I’m not really opposed to allowing it—it’s a fairly awkward requirement anyway and the arcane hierophant isn’t really good enough to justify it—but be ready for the question.
Languages
Absolutely include Common as an automatic language.
Favored Class
Yes, your table allows free multiclassing: so does almost every table. The multiclass XP penalty is probably the single most unpopular rule in the entire system and almost no one uses it—and absolutely no one should, since it was a bad idea that doesn’t really achieve what it set out to do—which was itself also a bad idea to begin with.
But that being the case, it’s probably not worth making this longer than it has to be. Just pick a favored class and assign it, and don’t make this space take up more room than it has to.
Alignment Restriction
Wrong.
I’m sorry, that’s rude, but this is simply incorrect by the rules of the system. Races—creatures generally—are not alignment restricted. Even demons and devils can change alignment—if literal evil incarnate can be good, if literal chaos-incarnate can be lawful, so can these sidhelien.
Infamous Reputation (Alien Mien)
(I think you should probably just pick one name, personally, unless “infamous reputation” is going to be a recurring thing across several different races/classes/whatevers.)
Anyway, “everyone dislikes them because of the historical relations between their peoples” is really more of a thing that should be handled at the level of NPCs starting attitudes and such, rather than skill modifiers. Possibly it’s worth noting that NPCs may have worse starting attitudes than they would with other races, but I note that Wizards of the Coast did not do that, and instead this kind of thing was a roleplaying concern that was explained in the race’s long description, and not included in the bullet points. See, for example, the half-orc description in the Player’s Handbook. I’d probably opt for that.
But if you really want it to be mechanical, these bonuses and penalties are appropriate. You’re going to want to make sure the penalties overcome the race’s bonus to Charisma—and I’ll note here that penalties to Charisma are one way that Wizards of the Coast noted this kind of issue, and as silly as that winds up being in many cases, that is the precedent and applying a “penalty” in the form of not giving the race +2 Charisma would be appropriate.
Soulless (1)
Ew, split-level parties being encouraged? Please don’t. Don’t go mucking about with XP; the system already does far too much of that.
Anyway, this feature is awkward even ignoring the optional rule.
First of all, as written, you have a discrepancy between “only by a Wish or Miracle” and “same as Outsiders” since those two statements do not match one another. The outsider type lists limited wish and true resurrection alongside miracle and wish, and other spells after the Player’s Handbook can also do it, such as revive outsider (raise dead but for outsiders, 6th-level conjuration, 5000-gp diamond component, Spell Compendium). You should—if you want to continue along this vein—just say that they can only be raised from the dead by spells that are capable of raising an outsider from the dead.
But more importantly, this doesn’t really capture the fluff you’re describing. What you really want is to require that they be raised in parallel with their “other half.” Can’t have one without the other, etc. So just say that: say you have to coordinate with someone in the fey realm who is raising their counterpart at the same time you are, effectively requiring them to be raised twice (and forcing you to manage the coordination, which is no mean feat at 7th (reincarnate) or 9th level (raise dead). Then you can say that more powerful spells that can raise outsiders can work without requiring the coordination. (And, I guess, raise both? It’s not clear how this would work.)
Finally, again with the naming thing, per Immunities above, except now I’m also confused by the name “soulless”—how literally am I to take that? That could have a lot of ramifications here. Is this race immune to trap the soul? For that matter, how does it even work, what animates them? Warforged are maybe soulless, maybe, but a lot of the questions are answered by what they are (constructs) and the question is really only whether or not they have their own souls, as opposed to just elementals bound to their frame that provide animation.
Soulless (2)
This is extremely awkward and something the system just doesn’t do well. Unlike the edition you’re adapting from, in 3.x no race is barred from any class. It’s just not a thing, and that’s a pretty significant part of the system’s identity. This isn’t quite as “flat wrong” as the alignment restriction, but it is very out of keeping with all precedent and stated design constraints.
Instead, you want to block them from doing certain things. If you can’t have a domain, turn or rebuke undead, or cast divine spells, taking a level of cleric makes no sense (it’s literally worse than an NPC class) and no one will do it (probably), but it will be much more in keeping with the game as a whole. It also allows you to avoid weird corner cases, like banning the entire factotum class because of one feature that lets them fake being a priest and turn undead a little.
This is also important because it gets at the heart of the problem here: It’s simply not clear what precisely the race is lacking that prevents them from accessing divine power. You need more details here to make it clearer, so that players and DMs know where the line is exactly. For instance, the karsite race has
Spellcasting Inability: A karsite cannot cast arcane or divine spells, even if he takes levels in a class that grants spellcasting ability. He can use spell-like abilities, psionic powers, and magic items normally.
(Tome of Magic, pg. 85)
That doesn’t cover everything you want it to, at a guess, but it’s very clear on what you cannot do as a karsite, which is cast spells. Well, technically, they can cast spells if they are neither arcane nor divine—which describes artificer infusions, so there is a corner case there that the authors of Tome of Magic may not have anticipated.
Which brings us to my final point here: 3.x has way, way more sources of magical power than just arcane and divine. Splitting the race that way... doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I have a whole lot of questions:
- Who gets psionics?
- Who can make pacts? (Does being “soulless” prevent “soul binding” altogether?)
- For that matter, what about the Book of Exalted Deeds vows, can sidheliens make those?
- Where do artificer infusions fall?
- How about warlock invocations, are those arcane enough to be sidhelien-only?
- If so, what about dragonfire adept invocations—those too?
- And if so, are dragon shaman auras in the same boat?
- And if so, are marshal auras? What if a marshal gets a dragon aura?
- Ki, as used by monks and ninjas?
- Blade “magic”? What about when it’s actually magical, as in the supernatural maneuvers, does that change anything?
- The whole smörgåsbord of various spell-like and supernatural abilities frequently handed out by classes that are not clearly divine or arcane?
- What if the other race that got the “divine” side becomes a half-dragon, does their stuff still work considering dragons are kinda-sorta inherently arcane?
I feel like working this race into 3.x and trying to capture this “split” is going to require a bit more thinking on your part on where exactly you want the line to be. And that means determining more about what each race is actually lacking. If it’s a connection to the gods... clerics of ideals are a thing in 3.x. If it’s a connection to the “divine,” well, what exactly does that mean? Maybe what you want is something like
Sidhelien do not gain any class features that would be lost if they became an ex-member of that class. This does not make them ex-members of that class, and does not prevent them from gaining more levels in that class, but they “lose” (never gain) class features as if they were ex-members of that class. This makes many classes, especially divine classes, very poor—and very rare—choices for sidhelien.
Though IIRC there are some non-divine classes that will get nailed by this. Still, it might be the best rule-of-thumb available.
The opposite race will be even worse, I suspect. What does it mean to be cut off from the “arcane,” I mean, the arcane is kind of just reality, the word literally just means “secrets” and arcane magic is supposed to just be a matter of knowing a secret “cheat code” to reality that gets it to do what you want. Is the opposite race unable to have that knowledge? Or does the cheat code just fail for them? And does it include stuff like bardic music? That’s magical, and bard’s a class that’s got arcane spells, but it’s not at all clear to me that the magic of their music is arcane. (And what about divine bards?) And then just... every spell-like or supernatural ability from any class that isn’t explicitly divine is going to be suspect.
