Class Is Function
A class describes what your character can do under pressure. A fighter might be a marine, duelist, security officer, or exosuit ace. A rogue might be an infiltrator, smuggler, slicer, scout, or systems thief.
Player's handbook
Character Rules
Use this page when building or updating a Stellar Dawn character. The campaign uses fifth edition as its rules language, but many familiar options are described through starships, alien worlds, impossible technology, and whatever strange power waits behind The Quiet Ones.
Character creation
Building 5e Characters in Stellar Dawn
Your class, background, skills, tools, and features still use normal fifth edition mechanics. Stellar Dawn changes how those choices look and feel in the setting, but it should not change what they do on your sheet unless a specific rule says so.
Background Is Origin
A background describes the life that shaped you before the campaign. Reframe its proficiencies, contacts, and equipment through colonies, stations, fleets, labs, guilds, cults, or frontier settlements.
A sailor might become a station dockhand, convoy spacer, or shuttle crew veteran. A sage might become an archive analyst, xenoresearcher, or monastery-trained signal interpreter.
Mechanics Stay Legible
If a feature has a clear 5e rule, use that rule. The table can change the description to fit the scene, but the feature should remain recognizable to the player using it.
Flavor changes
Reskin Without Shrinking
Flavor changes should make a fifth edition option feel native to Stellar Dawn while preserving its mechanics. Description can change freely; functionality, limits, costs, ranges, proficiencies, and action economy stay the same unless the table agrees to an actual rule change.
Magic May Have Many Explanations
A spell, class feature, or supernatural effect might be actual magic, hard-light construction, psionics, impossible physics, relic technology, divine intervention, Quiet Ones influence, or something no one understands yet. Unless a rule says otherwise, it still functions as written.
Arcana Covers Impossible Systems
Arcana applies when the thing in front of you behaves like magic at the table, even if the setting later explains it as technology, anomaly science, psionics, or a breach in ordinary reality.
Thieves' Tools Become Intrusion Tools
When a class grants Thieves' Tools, use Intrusion Tools in Stellar Dawn. Rogues remain excellent at locks, alarms, terminals, security systems, stolen credentials, hidden panels, and getting into places people meant to keep closed.
Open Tool EquivalentsAnimals Are Still Animals
Animal Handling remains useful for alien beasts, mounts, trained creatures, and bioforms. Mechanical drones use Drone Rigs, Engineer's Tools, or Intrusion Tools instead, depending on whether you are piloting, repairing, or hacking them.
Reference
Skill and Tool Equivalents
Skill, tool, vehicle, and equipment equivalents follow the same rule as other flavor changes: the description changes to fit the setting, while the fifth edition function remains intact.
Outside Controlled Systems
Survival is the skill for staying alive when infrastructure stops helping you: hostile planets, wreckage fields, failing life support, dangerous weather, tracking, exposure, and scarcity.
Separate the Fiction
If it has instincts, use Animal Handling. If it has code, use Intrusion Tools. If it has machinery, use Engineer's Tools. If it is being piloted, use a Drone Rig or vehicle proficiency.
Open Skill Equivalents
Use the skill guide for examples of what familiar skill proficiencies mean during actual Stellar Dawn play.
Open Skill EquivalentsOpen Tool Equivalents
Use the tools guide for hacking, repairs, forgery, disguises, medicine, crafting, chemistry, languages, and codes.
Open Tool EquivalentsOpen Vehicles and Drones
Use the vehicle guide for spacecraft, planetary craft, mechs, Drone Rigs, navigation, cartography, and sensors.
Open Vehicles and DronesOpen Equipment Flavor
Use the equipment guide when choosing normal fifth edition armor, shields, weapons, and gear that need Stellar Dawn descriptions.
Open Equipment FlavorOpen Resting and Travel
Use the travel guide for shipboard duty, off-duty rests, downtime during travel, and exhaustion from hostile conditions.
Open Resting and Travel