Character Creation

The world of Athas is more deadly than most worlds in Dungeons & Dragons. To survive and become heroes in this world, player characters need an edge, so ability scores range from 5 to 20 (before racial adjustments) instead of 3 to 18.

Generating the Ability Scores

I have decided that future characters will not generate their scores randomly. Instead, they will start with a matrix a scores as follows: 18, 16, 16, 14, 14, 12. Before applying racial modifiers, they may modify these scores in two ways.

They may reduce a higher score in order to increase a lower score with each point of decrease in the higher score giving 1 point of increase in the lower score.
They may reduce a lower score to increase a higher score (up to a maximum of 20) with each point of the higher score costing 2 points of the lower score.

Once you have assigned these scores, select a race for your character, then apply modifiers according to the table below:

Race	STR	DEX	CON	INT	WIS	CHA
Aarakokra	-2	+4	-2	0	0	0
Dwarf	0	0	+2	0	0	-2
Elf	0	+2	-2	0	0	0
Half-Elf	0	+2	0	0	0	-2
Half-Giant	+8	-2	+4	-4	-4	-4
Halfling	-2	+2	0	0	0	0
Human	0	0	0	0	0	0
Mul	+4	0	+2	0	0	-2
Pterran	+2	0	0	0	+2	+2
Thri-kreen	0	+4	0	-2	+2	-4

For more information about each race, see the Character Races section.

Psionic Wild Talents

Each character will start the game with one or two wild psionic talents. See Psionics for details.

Character Class

Next, you should select a character class or classes. Characters will begin the game as 3rd level characters, and those 3 levels may be distributed between more than one class. To see what classes are available and how they have been modified from 3rd Edition rules, jump to the “Character Classes” section from the list on the left.

Hit Points

Characters will start off with maximum hit points for their first hit die. For hit dice after the first, the player picks one of these 2 methods:

Cascade Rolling
Roll the die appropriate to your class. If you don’t like the result, discard it and roll the next smaller die. Continue until you either like the roll or you roll a d2. The progression goes like this: d12, d10, d8, d6, d4, d3, d2. All dice must be rolled under the knowing eyes of the GM.

Straight Assignment
Dice are not rolled. You are assigned hit points according to your hit die as follows: d12=9, d10=7, d8=6, d6=4, d4=3.

Please note that the Straight Assigned values were designed to give you slightly better scores than the Cascade Rolling method, so unless you really like rolling the dice, you should probably pick the Straight Assigned method.