Character Package Example
About a month ago in one of my non-D&D classes some of the boys were talking about the stuff happening in the beginner D&D class. A young girl was listening in, intrigued, and seemed interested. I asked her if she played or was interested, and she responded by asking if she could play as a fairy.
I responded “of course!”. Then we started talking about all the classes she could choose from, but knowing her family is into art, performance, and especially singing, I told her about the bard class. After that she was even more interested, jumping along excitedly as we walked.
I went home that night and created a character that I thought would fit her and wrote up a backstory. It took a few more nights of thinking about it and rewriting, but I thought I had a pretty good one. I went to HeroForge.com and created a miniature, using the free snapshot feature to download a picture, which I included with the backstory.
The next class day I brought it in to show her an example of what she could do and she carefully read it. She loved it and thought it was perfect.
Next I made a version of the character on D&D Beyond, and then created a printable version using the class-specific character sheets I found on the DM’s Guild.
Finally, I created some spell cards for her using the fantastic Rpg-cards site (now maintained by Mephit). So far these are mostly RAW, but I did personalize the colors and icons. I also added a card for Bardic Inspiration, adopting the rules from the One D&D playtest. I think that change is a huge improvement — using the old rules Bardic Inspiration almost never got used because the kids that received it never remembered it, even when they were given a card or token representing it.
At the time, that whole bundle — backstory write-up, printable sheet, spell cards, and the rpg-cards JSON — was the package I planned to hand off at the start of the next semester. Other kids were already signing up, so I was going to ask their parents what they wanted to play and build similar starter packages so we’d be ready with better-than-pre-gen characters.
Note added later
Those tools and attachments made sense in 2022, when a zip of PDFs and a JSON file was a practical way to share a ready-to-play character. We have better options now, so freezing old downloads here isn't actually useful anymore — the files go stale, links rot, and the live character keeps changing at the table.
If you want to see where Melody is now, her current campaign info lives here:
I also started playing around with MidJourney, an AI art generator, and I made a few test pictures of Melody. I haven’t settled on a good common style yet. Which version do you like best? Can you think of a better style to use for 7-10 year olds just starting their D&D adventures?
