The race you select will affect how much experience it takes to raise a level, the amount of experience necessary to increase one of your stats by a point, what light levels are comfortable for you, the maximum for each stat, healing rates, hunger and thirst rates, and what genders are available for you to choose from.
Some races even have special abilities, such as infravision, that other races lack.
Here are the races currently available to players and an indepth description about each of them. Newbies are the starting race in Frontier. They have no discernable skills, no remarkable abilities, and no exceptional powers. Their existence is limited to players below Level 5 where a race choice becomes manditory. You can either exist as a Newbie until then and get a feel for exactly which race might suit you best, or you can choose your race immediately.