Character options available in Player’s Handbook or Monsters of the Multiverse are available to players, unless explicitly forbidden.

Character options available in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything are subject to DM approval.

Character options from other sources are generally discouraged, but players are welcome to make a case for their inclusion.

Please coordinate with other players before choosing character classes. If the DM’s child (“The Cub”) is a player in your group, please let them have first choice on a character concept when it conflicts with yours. Similarly, any other children who are present should get higher priority for their character concepts, because we want them to enjoy the game. If the DM’s Lovely Wife is in the group, she gets to negotiate with the other players like the adult she is. 😄

Please prepare more than one character concept in case your first choice doesn’t work out:

• Low level characters can be glass cannons.
• Your character may die.
• You may change your mind about how much you like your character.
• Your concept overlaps too much with another player’s concept.

There may be any number of dwarves, elves, halflings, or humans in the party. There may be no more than one of any other race.

Players may choose races available in D&D5e Player’s Handbook or Monsters of the Multiverse, with the exceptions of the following:

• Aasimar
• Tiefling

Players may choose these third-party races:

• Leonin
• Loxodon

Players may choose from these homebrew races:

• Promised, a template which combines and replaces both Aasimar and Tiefling
• Veiz, humanoids who resemble wolves, coyotes, or dogs
• Vodshi, humanoids who resemble bears

In terms of party composition, Promised counts as both its base species and Promised.

Your chosen race may affect how NPCs treat your character. A full-blooded orc in a mostly-human settlement may draw more than just suspicious glances!

Your characters will start at level 1, with money and equipment typically allowed them as described in the Player’s Handbook. If it is not on your character sheet, then your character does not have it.

The starting array of ability scores is: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. If your race has a standard set of ability modifications in the Player’s Handbook, you may use those. If you do not like them, you may claim +2 to one ability and +1 to one other, or +1 to three separate abilities. If you want the Variant Human skill and feat, you must choose +1 to two different ability scores.

No character is socially inept, forgetful, dim-witted, waifish, absent-minded, clumsy, illiterate, or stupid unless their player explicitly writes it in their description.

In the setting the DM has prepared, humans and half-humans will tend to have names reflecting a certain set of national origins or ethnicities. Half-humans will tend to have either a given name or a surname from their human side, but not both. Non-humans will tend to have names strongly associated with their race.

If you play a human or half-human, consider names from these ethnicities or regions:

Flavor	PHB	XGtE	Other
similar to the nation where you start	Calishite	Arabic	Hellenic
	Mulan	French	Romance
	Turami	Greek	other Southern European
		Roman	other Western European
		Spanish
possibly from a rival nation	Damaran	German	other Central Asian
	Rashemi	Norse	other Eastern European
		Slavic	other Northern European
		Turkic
foreign but not exotic	Chondathan	Celtic	other Middle-Eastern
	Illuskan	English	other South Asian
		Indian
		Persian
foreign and exotic	Shou	anything else	anything else

These are only guidelines. Ultimately, your character’s name is up to you. Remember that names that sound like they’re “not from around here” may earn reactions from certain NPCs.

Initially, your character may not be evil. If it makes for a compelling story arc, you may be able to work with the DM to shift your character’s alignment over time.

Alignments are not hard-and-fast rules. Even two characters of the same alignment can have very contentious disagreements over a situation, that could even escalate to violence. But you should not totally ignore your character’s alignment either. For characters with deities or oaths, the consequences for deviation may be more severe. Let it be an initial rough sketch of your character’s morals, ethics, and principles. If it changes shape over time, that’s fine. Perhaps your character does experience something profound that could shift their alignment significantly; that process could be a very interesting story unto itself!

Now that you’ve created your character in a vacuum, you get to build some Character Description to explore their relationship with the world and the other characters in the party! If the DM likes what you’ve done, you may even get bonuses above and beyond what the rules would normally allow…