>Before I step ahead of myself, I know this has been brought
>up, but what about adding racial languagues?

I know I've answered this before, but I suppose I'll answer it again.
Imagine this, we spend a couple weeks generating perl-based language
rules for a handful of races. The language goes in and you do a
little dance as your Drow begins speaking pig-latin to his buddies
and all the Dwarves in the room grumble to themselves. Then one
Dwarf creates a Drow and begins speaking every word combination he
can think of to build up a lexicon/translator for Drowish. He then
runs that through his client and has it autotranslate everything you
say so he can understand it perfectly. There goes a couple weeks of
work and this "cool feature" of the game becomes a non-issue as
translators are pawned off over out-of-character channels.

>To take it a step further, what about adding racial cabal
>options? Such as the Dwarven Brigade, or Elven protectors,
>or Fire Giant Marauders, etc etc.

Oddly, this was the original plan for the Empire. The draft title
was "Empire of the Underdark" and it was going to be a racial alliance
cabal. Things changed. Morale was based heavily on racial combos
(encouraging racial separationism); interestingly enough, the people
that were cleaning up from having high morale said nothing and the
great gnashing of teeth from folks with low morale woke the dead.
Would I like to see CF race wars? Yeah. Do I think it's going
to happen any time soon? Probably not.

>To take this even a step *further*, how about adding Cabal
>items for them?

I'd be ok with (for example) Orc Clans being able to down cabal
items, regardless of whether or not they had a village item
themselves. A few years ago, after visiting Venice, I was
intrigued by the idea of having holy relics in different cities;
possession of the relics resulting in various benefits, loss of the
relics resulting in various urban misfortunes. Those ideas have
sort of been back-burnered and may or may not ever see the light of
day again. I'd probably vote for that before voting for cabal items
for the non-human villages.

>To take this even a step *FURTHER*, how about adding
>race-only classes to these race-cabals.

There is some talk of handling races separately from classes. I
won't say much of anything about that, though.