Yeah, I've kept the speech color bit in the CS in the hopes that it will return to this forum in the future. 

Also, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the lore either.

As to your question about human(oid) characters, yes, you could play a character that is not human(oid), however just keep in mind that interaction is a big part of this game, and traditionally people who have played characters that were not human, or at the very least humanoid, have tended to not last all that long in the game because they have had a hard time figuring out how to integrate their character into the game. 

But if you can do it, more power to you.