Navigating the Character Creation Menus

When you are presented with two or more options, you can move to one by pressing the key for the appropriate letter, or move up and down the list with the cursor keys. Press the enter key to confirm the option you have chosen. You can return to a previous set of options with the left cursor key.

Gender

Your first choice is whether to play a male or female character. This has no effect on how the game is played, but adds to the flavour.

Race

You can choose from eleven creature races for your character. The race you choose will affect your character stats and some intrinsic abilities, as well as some of your subsequent choices, such as class – certain races are severely disdvantaged from having specific occupations, e.g. Dunadan characters becoming be Rogues. The effects on stats and intrinsic abilities is shown when each race option is highlighted; if this doesn't mean much to you yet, for now just note that Humans are the 'vanilla' option (with no modifications to stats, and average values for hit dice and experience).

Class

This is effectively your character's 'job type'. There are six classes to choose from, and your choice will have a major impact on how you will need to play the game, if you want to survive for any length of time! As with your character's race, class will affect your character stats and some intrinsic abilities as shown on screen. There is no 'vanilla' option here – all classes give positive or negative modifiers to some of your stats. See the classes section for more information to help you choose your starting class.

Character Generation

The next section is where you generate your character's stats, modified by race and class as above. There are three option for how to do this:

• Point-based
• Autoroller
• Standard roller

Point-based is the recommended option, and is also the best way to explain the effect of your stats on how the game is played; all three methods will be explained in the Stat Generation section. Stats also influence a wide range of character attributes and abilities, as shown on the Character Screen page