Creating a Character
The campus of Strixhaven draws a student body from across the world—or many worlds. With your DM’s permission, you can create just about any Strixhaven character you can imagine, drawing on player character rules from the Player’s Handbook and other D&D books.
The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.
Chapter 1 describes each of the colleges. How do you decide which of these colleges is right for your character? Consider these approaches:
Read the college descriptions in chapter 1, and choose the college that appeals to you.
Read the descriptions of backgrounds and feats in this chapter. If one of them catches your eye, choose that college.
If you have access to Magic: The Gathering cards from the Strixhaven set, find a card that appeals to you and build that character.
If you’re starting a Strixhaven campaign with the introductory adventure in chapter 3, that adventure gives all the advice you need to bring a party of characters together. The adventure assumes that the characters are first-year students who are participating in orientation activities together.
If you start the campaign at higher level, using one of the adventures in later chapters of this book (or an adventure of your DM’s creation), give some thought to what has brought your characters together as a group. The easiest explanation is that you met as first-year students, perhaps living in the same residence hall or taking the same classes, or united by a common extracurricular interest.
It’s also possible that your characters are just meeting for the first time. The events of the adventure might throw you together more or less at random. You could all be taking the same class, you might be working the same campus job, or you could be introduced by mutual friends.
Ability Score Increases
When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one of those scores by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy.The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.
Languages
Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of widespread languages to choose from. The DM is free to add or remove languages from that list for a particular campaign.Creature Type
Every creature in D&D, including every player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters, including owlin, are of the Humanoid type. Creature types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the text of the cure wounds spell specifies that the spell doesn’t work on a creature that has the Construct type.Life Span
The typical life span of a player character in D&D is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure.Height and Weight
Player characters, including owlin, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player’s Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.Choosing a College
At Strixhaven, students choose their colleges at the start of their second year. But even during a character’s first year, you make college-related decisions for your character, such as a background choice. From the start, your character is making decisions that will lead to their eventual college choice.Chapter 1 describes each of the colleges. How do you decide which of these colleges is right for your character? Consider these approaches:
Read the college descriptions in chapter 1, and choose the college that appeals to you.
Read the descriptions of backgrounds and feats in this chapter. If one of them catches your eye, choose that college.
If you have access to Magic: The Gathering cards from the Strixhaven set, find a card that appeals to you and build that character.
If you’re starting a Strixhaven campaign with the introductory adventure in chapter 3, that adventure gives all the advice you need to bring a party of characters together. The adventure assumes that the characters are first-year students who are participating in orientation activities together.
If you start the campaign at higher level, using one of the adventures in later chapters of this book (or an adventure of your DM’s creation), give some thought to what has brought your characters together as a group. The easiest explanation is that you met as first-year students, perhaps living in the same residence hall or taking the same classes, or united by a common extracurricular interest.
It’s also possible that your characters are just meeting for the first time. The events of the adventure might throw you together more or less at random. You could all be taking the same class, you might be working the same campus job, or you could be introduced by mutual friends.