Character Creation

This quick document will provide some basic notes for the D&D campaign we will be playing. We will be playing the Dragonlance:Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign. If you’re familiar with the Dragonlance books and the original storyline, this takes place at about the same time as the original set of adventures and books and tells the story of a part of the war against the dragon armies that are invading Krynn.

Sourcebooks:

We’ll be playing 5th edition, using the core books, (PHB, DMG, MM), the key expansion books (Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) and the Dragonlance campaign sourcebook, and I’m open to exploring other ideas if you have ideas/things you want to try, etc.
Don’t worry about buying books if you don’t own them. I’ll bring my copies when we play, and you can access them online through my DND Beyond account.
Character Options: Your characters will start out as first level characters with some tie to a fishing village called Vogler. Vogler is near a major port city called Kalaman, and is on the edge of the Hinterlund, the northern part of the empire of Solamnia.
Your characters will be people who, for one reason or another, are on hand and able to help the people of the region fight against the forces of evil invading the land.

Typical Races & subraces:

If you go into DNDBeyond to make your character, on the race screen you’ll be flooded with choices. Stick with these options, please, unless you see something that you are just dying to play (anything more exotic might require some explaining).
• Dwarves – Mountain dwarves, Hill dwarves • Elves – Silvanesti High elves, Qualinesti High Elves, Kagonesti Wood Elves, Sea Elves • Gnomes – Forest gnomes and tinker gnomes • Humans – regular or variant • Kender (like halflings, but turned up loud)
Other races – we can talk about it (I'm a pushover)

Classes

We’ll start at 1st level, so you will need to pick your starting class. All of the classes are available except blood hunter. When we start talking about the subclasses, we may need to differentiate.

Attributes

Note that we will use the newer rules where you will decide where to place your ability adjustments (one stat will get a +2, one will get a +1). I’m open to rolling for attributes or using a standard array (15,14,13,12,10,8). Do you feel lucky?

Backgrounds

Each character has a background, which is essentially the life the character lived before becoming an adventurer – and might be an indicator of the life that the character might hope to go back to after adventuring, too.
Again, the backgrounds in DND Beyond mix in a bunch of options that may not make a ton of sense, but take a look and see what you think. My recommended list for the campaign would include (the two in bold/italics are special for this campaign):

Acolyte Charlatan City Watch/Investigator Criminal/Spy Entertainer Fisher Folk Hero Gambler Gladiator

Guild Artisan/Guild Merchant Hermit Knight Knight of Solamnia Mage of High Sorcery Marine Mercenary Veteran Noble Outlander

Pirate Sage Sailor Shipwright Smuggler Soldier Urchin

Equipment

Dndbeyond will walk you through buying equipment, I recommend picking “equipment” rather than “gold” as the starting package, it’ll save you a lot of time.