D&D Beyond Rules Compatibility

This chapter explains how published D&D species fit into Teradill. It does not replace or modify their game mechanics.

• Default rules: This guide assumes D&D Beyond 5.5e, the revised 2024 rules used for this campaign.
• 5e characters: A player may instead build a character using the 2014 5e rules, but that character should use one rules generation consistently rather than mixing 5e and 5.5e versions of the same character options.
• Published mechanics: Use the selected D&D Beyond species entry’s published traits exactly as presented. This chapter adds setting lore, not replacement mechanics.
• Mixed heritage: A character of mixed cultural or biological heritage still uses one published D&D Beyond species rules package unless the DM explicitly approves a supported homebrew option.
• Narrative flexibility: Appearance, family history, homeland, culture, and Aether exposure can usually be described without creating new mechanics.
• Kajeet and Firbolg: These approved peoples use their published 5e Tabaxi and Firbolg rules respectively when selected.

Aeloria is not a continent where every people lives in a separate box. Humans, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, elves, and many rarer lineages have traded, argued, studied, migrated, married, fought, and rebuilt beside one another for centuries.

Your character’s ancestry can shape how people see you, what assumptions they make, what doors open easily, and which prejudices or expectations you may have to push against. It does not decide your personality, class, morality, politics, or future.

In this guide, the most important question is not simply:

“What people are you from?”

It is:

“How does your character fit into Aeloria, and what brought them to the Grand Scholarium?”

A dwarven poetry student, a halfling legal prodigy, a gnomish duelist, an elven engineer, a human field botanist, and an orc-blooded scholarship student can all belong at the Scholarium — but they will each move through its halls differently.

A Note on Aelorian Society

Aeloria is in an age of rapid rediscovery. Old magic is being studied again. Starshards power machines, laboratories, mills, lifts, weapons, and dangerous dreams. Printing presses spread ideas faster than kings can control them. Experimental flying-machine theories, spring engines, alchemy, clockwork, and regulated spellcraft are changing what ordinary people believe may someday be possible. No functioning skyships currently exist.

Most Aelorians think of themselves as practical and civilized. They value law, trade, food, scholarship, reputation, craft, and stability. They also live in the shadow of old catastrophes. Ruins, restricted archives, crater fields, haunted forests, and forbidden research remind everyone that brilliance without restraint can break the world.

Because of that, different peoples often carry different cultural reputations:

• Humans are seen as ambitious builders of the modern age.
• Dwarves are associated with endurance, craft, and industrial discipline.
• Gnomes are linked to invention, theory, and dangerous curiosity.
• Halflings are trusted as farmers, riverfolk, clerks, cooks, quartermasters, and keepers of community memory.
• Elves are admired, feared, resented, romanticized, and rarely understood.
• Rarer lineages are often treated as signs of foreign blood, old magic, Aether exposure, or strange fate.

These are broad public assumptions, not universal truths.