Character Creation

Welcome to character creation! My personal favorite part of any RPG!

Where Do I Begin?

The first thing I would recommend is checking out this step-by-step guide on creating characters for 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. Give it a skim, or read the whole thing, and take a look at the various classes and races to give you some ideas on what kind of character you want to play. These AWESOME class and race cards are great aids for which class and race to pick.
New players will create third level characters for 5th edition D&D. This starting level can increase through upgrading the home city. Nearly anything is fair game for this campaign. Anything in the SRD is automatically fine to use. If you're interested in using anything beyond that, or want to work with me to create your own class, please run it by me and we'll work together on it. Outside of the base classes and ancestries, Here is a list of all D&D 5e classes, subclasses, and the sourcebook you can find them in, and here is a list of all ancestries (races) you can choose from. Check out our Discord's Useful Links channel for a link to my collection of D&D 5e sourcebooks.

The Character Sheet

Once you pick your class and race, you've started making your character! you're probably going to want to start writing this stuff down. There's lots of different options out there for character sheets, so feel free to do a google search. However, here are a couple of my favorite resources:

• A form fillable, printable character sheet
• Online character sheets

Rolling Your Stats

Next you'll need to roll the six ability scores of your character: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma. This is something you'll need to do with me (the Gamemaster), but I'll briefly describe the process here.

1. Roll 4d6 and drop the lowest number
2. Add them together, this is one ability score
3. Repeat 5 times so you have a total of 6 scores
4. Figure out the modifier for each number (check out the "determine ability scores" section in the step-by-step guide linked above)
5. These next three steps are purely to determine if the stats are fair
6. Add the six modifiers together
7. If the total is below a +2 or above a +8, reroll the six ability scores and repeat
8. If none of your ability scores are above a 14, you may reroll all six and try again

If this was confusing, don't worry about it. I'll need to be there when you do this anyways and I can walk you through it then.

Completing Your Character

Continue following the step-by-step guide until you've completed your character. As I've stated in the player's guide, anything is fair game as long as it falls in the base rules (what's referred to as the SRD). Anything outside that should be okay, just run it by me first.
If you run into any road bumps along the way, please ask me or any of the other players who have done this before. Also, once you've gotten to this point it might be a good idea to show me what you've got so far in the unlikely event that I need to tweak something. After you've completed your 1st level character, it's time to level it up to level 3!

Leveling Your Character

As I stated in the player's guide, this campaign begins at level 3. Once you have your 1st level character made, go ahead and level it up twice. The step-by-step guide linked above also has a section at the bottom titled "Beyond 1st Level" that will assist you with this. One of the steps included is gaining more health, which means rolling your hit die! This will also have to be done with me present.
After you've completed this section, you're ready to play!

Your Character's Backstory

During character creation, you picked a background. You can leave your backstory at that (which is totally fine for this campaign), or you can use it as a springboard for creating your character's full backstory. I highly encourage incorporating bits of my world, Ardunor, in your character's backstory. I will, however, warn you that because this adventure takes place almost entirely in the wilderness, some backstory elements may simply never get used.
I do enjoy involving my player's character backstories into my campaigns, so I will be more than happy to work with you and find something that fits and that you will be able to see in action once we start playing.