From PDF Introduction
A Savage Species Web Enhancement
The Savage Species book offers new templates, prestige classes, spells, and feats. In addition, it contains a wealth of information about how to build and advance monster characters, and even how to transform a standard-race character into a monster character. As if that weren’t enough to make it cool, it even presents entirely new player character races-anthropomorphic animals and half-ogres. But those races have level adjustments and starting Effective Character Levels (ECLs), so they aren’t appropriate for creating 1st-level characters.
This web enhancement presents two new character races, one of which has a +0 level adjustment, so it can be used to build a 1st-level character. The notes about how these races were built provides a great demonstration of how to evaluate and tinker with level adjustments. That information will prove invaluable when
you design new races for your own campaign.