I though I would give this a try. It works, even the character creator but the moment the legionnaire asks me to walk forward to get my headcut off at the starting the world freezes. Not the game but it seems like there is some kind of check in place and no one moves, and looking at other custom races I have it set up identical and yet they work fine. Has anyone had success with the truly custom races that use creatures skeletons and such?

I'm having trouble with stuff similiar... not as far along as you. I just duplicated troll race as playtrollrace, and made it playable, with facegen, which you can enter a saved game and select the troll, but when you in game you can't see yourself. I was thinking of looking into one of those 3dimage editor's and see bout copying some of the human images and making them look like a troll, but now that i think bout it, you pretty much would have to have the same size dimensions unless you wanted to alter like all the pictures of how it would look with the armor and stuff. Anyone know an easy way to make the regular non-playable characters playable? like a skelleton, troll, or other human shaped monsters?

A lot of the opening scripts reference Player Race as a specific race and has no catch all set (which is not uncommon and even repeated as Oblivion's opening did this as well) -> if you want to start off as a modded race you will have to correct these scripts with a catch all race selection and push the quests forward.

When you copied the race over did you set Morph race and armor race to troll, under copied data ? If you do not your creature/character will be invisible.

Why don't you make a character, say a Nord, and then use setrace command to switch it to Skeleton?

Because I didn't actually think of that:) Good show. Thanks much. I will try this and report back. I agree that the cutscene at the beginning will indeed be the main place where issues occur and you can not see your 3d model until the moment you have your hands cut. So I will need to have it setttherace to Nord right after choosing the Skeleton at the character create then back to Skeleton at the time when the hands are unbound.

I did, but it still was invisible.

I will check but I do believe that I had the same issue and for the life of me I can't remember how I got around it. Maybe download one of the creature mods online and look at what they did?