I’m picturing a centaur standing up on its hind legs while bicycle-kicking with its fore legs…

I don’t know that a different name is commonly used, but horned centaurs are a listed variant on the Wikipedia entry for “centaur.” =)

I am indeed more interested in emphasizing cultural and social distinction, if we’re staying within a narrower depiction of the centaur, but attaching “this kind has horns” to part of that distinction wouldn’t break anything to me.

Horned centaurs? Are you talking about bucentaurs? I’ve never heard of one with antlers before. I thought you were speaking more in terms of cultural differences than physical — maybe some centaurs are wise and stoic forest-dwellers while others are nomadic plains-dwelling barbarians.

As far as physical variants go, I’ve always liked the idea of zebrataurs with African features, ever since they appeared in Fantasia.

The Baskin Robbins 31 flavors of elf and dwarf for every terrain type bugs the crap out of me, not least of which is because it seems like such a total misunderstanding of the much more cultural and less physiological categories of elves in The Silmarillion.

From another angle, humans are “the most adaptable race,” but elves and dwarves are the races that show outward signs of having adapted.

I don’t like the idea of arbitrarily creating new subraces out of thin air. I like the idea of supporting subraces which have been a longtime part of the game’s lore (like high elves vs. wood elves). And if there’s a very strong story behind them, I’m all for the creation of brand new subraces. But I’ve never liked the idea of creating a dozen different subraces, one for every possible terrain (like Avian Gnomes, or Amphibious Kobolds, or Sand Thanoi).

Right, a horned/unhorned split is pretty well attested in mythology, as one option. Maybe one is more Zeus-and-Dionysus-friendly, and the other is more wise and stoic (a la Chiron)? I’ll grant, though, that that may seem like splitting hairs for general use.

I’d most like to see centaur treated as a top-level race group for a lot of four-feet-and-two-hands creatures – bauriar, wemic, and (in some depictions) lamia are three more of the subraces. That would probably really mess with what kinds of features even belong in the core of the race, though.

I can’t get the image of a kung-fu or acrobat centaur out of my head. That is DEFINITELY going to be my next character.

I’d like to see a centaur with antlers, more akin to the nature and more alienated to people.

All of that having been said, I do agree that it would have been more interesting to see these races possess traits that had broader usability across different classes and I think that attempting to design these options absent of the context of at least one specific campaign setting contributed to this.